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One Bad Day (Worm AU fic) [COMPLETE]
- Thread starter Ack
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- alternate universe worm
Ack
(Verified Ratbag) (Unverified Great Old One)
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She is absolutely not having a great day.
Part Thirteen: Make Your Own Luck
Ack
(Verified Ratbag) (Unverified Great Old One)
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2014
- Messages
- 7,479
- Likes received
- 78,182
One Bad Day
Part Thirteen: Make Your Own Luck
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Toybox
Cranial
"… okay, just reminding you, this is going to be a premium-rate job," Lil warned. "Seventy-five percent up front, and I keep fifty percent even if it falls through."
The girl on the other end of the phone call sighed; more in resignation than anything else, Lil judged. "Yeah, got it. Is there any way we can bring that down a little? I can cover it, but any discount's a good discount, you know?"
This was familiar ground for Lil, but she had to go over it every single time. "You could come to me instead of me going to you. That would zero out the travel cost and halve the security outlay. Reducing the number of memory sets I'm going to have to juggle would knock it down some as well. And I always charge more for involving unwilling subjects. My gear is delicate."
"You're just reading from them, not implanting memories. And most of them aren't capes, so there's a lot less chance of damaging your equipment." Tattletale was clearly trying to be persuasive. "And we can't tell them what's up, because—"
"Listen, I don't care about your hero-villain bullshit," Lil said impatiently. "The one who's getting the memory implant, the cape. Is she fully cognizant and aware of what's going to happen, and in full agreement with it?"
"Ah." It seemed Tattletale was finally on the same page. "Well, she's not against it, and it should be relatively easy to get her to sit still for the procedure—"
"Not the same thing." Lil had learned to be blunt, because otherwise people kept thinking they could argue her around. "If you can't cut any of that back, then the price stands. Can you pay?"
This time, the sigh was all resignation. "I'm sending the Number Man the authorisation to verify my ability to pay. He should be contacting you soon."
"Good." Lil banked with the Number Man herself. When it came to money matters, he was the platinum standard. "Once I've got that, I'll contact you back and arrange for my arrival there. Just remember: if there's any interruptions in the memory withdrawal or implantation process, it can easily cause ongoing problems later on. So security has to be rock-solid at your end."
"Wait, I thought you said I was paying for you to arrange security."
Lil rolled her eyes. "My security will be there to protect me and my equipment, and ensure I can duck and run if I have to. Your security will be there to make sure nobody interrupts, and to ensure I don't have to duck and run. Can you arrange that?"
Tattletale muttered something about 'pound of flesh closest to my heart' but didn't protest more strenuously. "Yeah, we got this. Several capes on site with a strong motivation for this to succeed. Good enough?"
"We'll have to see, won't we? I'll call you back once Number Man's contacted me." Lil ended the call then sat back, rubbing her forehead.
It sounded like a weird job. She didn't like weird jobs. They went places she wasn't necessarily comfortable with, there were usually complications of one sort or another, and the clients nearly always managed to avoid passing on details that would've been handy to know before commencement.
But she'd set her prices high for a reason, and she had no actual excuse for turning this one down. Plus, one of the drawcards for Toybox was that they got the job done. This was one of the reasons people kept coming back. And having a bad feeling about something wasn't necessarily a solid reason to drop it sight unseen.
Anyway, that was why she'd demanded extra for security.
Standing up, she headed out of her lab into the common area. Glace was there, watching TV with a hot chocolate in hand. "Hey," her fellow Tinker greeted her. "That job come through?"
Lil nodded. "Yeah. Premium rates, too."
"Woo!" Glace pumped her fist in the air. One-third of all fees got shared with the other members of Toybox; it was in their charter. So a win for one was a win for all. "Nicely done."
"Thanks. Dodge and Pyrotechnical around?"
"In their labs, as far as I know. Let me know how it turns out." Glace went back to watching TV.
"Will do." Lil moved on and poked her head into Dodge's workshop.
The kid was doing something finicky with a circuit-board, so she waited. Eventually, he straightened up from the magnifier, which she took as an opportunity to clear her throat. It was better, in her opinion, to not startle her colleagues while they were messing with things that could bend the very fabric of space-time into a pretzel.
"Oh, hi," he said, glancing around. "What's up?"
"That transport job I told you about the other day. Can we be ready to roll in thirty minutes?" With the amount of work ahead of her, it was going to take a while to get set up at the far end, and she wanted plenty of wiggle room.
His eyes went distant behind his goggles for a moment. "Uh, sure. Just your travel chair?"
"Plus a dozen or so extra memory modules and the processor unit," she said, and grimaced. "It's one of those complicated jobs." She was going to have to work hard to make sure all the modules she needed were in working order and packed safely for the trip to Brockton Bay, but that was why she'd arranged for the wiggle room.
"Wait, how are we carrying the modules?" Dodge looked momentarily worried. "They're fairly heavy, aren't they?"
"And fragile," Lil confirmed. Normally, when people came to her, she had a throne-like affair she sat the subjects down in, with a full sense-dep helmet that came down over the head onto the shoulders. It was only portable in the technical sense, requiring a forklift or pallet-jack to move it from one place to another. It also incorporated enough built-in memory modules to store the full brain-scans of two dozen people. "But I'm going to ask Pyrotechnical to come along as security, so he can maybe give us a hand."
Her 'travel chair' was a lot lighter (and more fragile), but had the supreme advantage of weighing not much more than a standard office chair. The helmet that came with it only covered the top half of the head with an opaque drop-down visor; Glace had jokingly likened it to a hairdresser's drying accessory, so now they called it the Hair Dryer as an in-joke. Its one big drawback was that it held no integral memory modules, but those could easily be carried along and plugged in. However, as Dodge had noted, they were heavy (and fragile).
"Yeah, that'll help," Dodge agreed. He put his thumb to his lips and chewed on the nail for a moment. "With everything we need to take along, the eight-by-eight is too small. We'll go with the sixteen instead. Roller bags for the modules?"
"Mm-hmm," Lil said distractedly. The memory processing unit (there was no way she could merge all those memories into one gestalt without it) was going to be an absolute beast to transport across; it was as heavy as a dozen memory modules all by itself, and a lot bulkier. "Didn't we have a cart of some sort that I can move the processor on?"
"Maybe," Dodge allowed dubiously. By the very nature of his specialty, he rarely needed mechanical assistance to move things from one place to another. "Or you could get Big Rig to throw one together for you."
"That's an idea." Lil nodded in agreement. "I'll get back to you in fifteen." She strolled on to Pyrotechnical's lab. "Hey, remember that job I asked if you could provide security for …?"
Circus
"Wait a minute."
She'd lost count of the number of times she'd tried to pick this lock, and failed. Over and over again, she'd been on the very edge of success when something happened, and her efforts undid themselves. But this time she'd heard it: the tiny click of one piece of metal snapping to another.
There was only one thing which could make that specific noise. "Magnets …" she breathed. "Coil, you slimy, tricky, motherfucking asshole." Keys, by definition, were made to fit precisely into the inner space of the lock, allowing no extraneous movement. The lock was designed to actively resist being picked by way of strategically placed magnets. It was the only explanation. Coil's keys also probably had magnets built into them, just to make sure of things; he was tricky like that.
If he wasn't already dead, I'd kill him myself.
She pulled a road flare out of her hammer-space and ignited it, then directed the heat into the lock, concentrating it there as hard as she could. It wouldn't melt the metal—if that was even a possibility, she would've blowtorched the door off its hinges long ago—but magnets didn't like heat, not even a little bit. And once the magnets were no longer magnets, she could pick the damn lock as per normal.
It was going to take a little while, she knew. Road flares didn't generate all that much heat, and she'd still have to wait for the whole thing to cool down afterward before she could start picking it again. But by the time she was finished with this lock, the magnets were going to be fucked, and that was all she needed.
Tattletale, when I get out of here, I'm going to kill you, just because.
PRT ENE Director's Office
Director Emily Piggot
Not for the first time, Emily decided it was a good thing that she was incapable of triggering with powers. Because with the sheer seething rage she felt right now, the top half of the PRT building would've been a smoking ruin if she had. Standing as straight as she could, knuckles planted on her desk, she glowered at both Armsmaster and the PRT captain who had brought her the bad news.
"How the fuck could this have happened?" It was only via the most stringent application of self-control that she didn't raise her voice, or start swearing non-stop. God knew, she wanted to do both. "You both agreed it was a good plan. You had four people in that house, apart from Brandish and Manpower! Yet somehow, someone infiltrated the house, drugged everyone, then spirited both New Wave capes out of the house, and our outside surveillance teams didn't see a damn thing. Can someone please explain this egregious fuckup to me in terms I can understand? Because unless you can, the phrases 'extreme negligence' and 'dereliction of duty' are going to be highlighted and underlined in my report on this matter."
Captain Hanson straightened his back an extra couple of degrees, even though he was already at attention. "Ma'am, I have been speaking to my teams, and they were awake and alert the whole time. Robertson says that Manpower offered to make the coffee himself. The only person who could've drugged it was … well, him."
Which opened a whole new can of worms. Emily shook her head. "Why would Manpower deliberately drug the people guarding him?"
"There's a Master involved," Armsmaster said, his voice flat with certainty. "There has to be. Also, I've got some interesting information that's only just come to light. First: the cameras belonging to the surveillance teams were blocked at very specific intervals by moths and other night-time insects. I've analysed the footage and picked out hints that a vehicle drove through that area at that time, but it's impossible to get any sort of make or model, much less an image of the driver. Second: the autopsy on Coil came back. He was shot in the head, alright. But what he was shot with was a bug. Some sort of large beetle, to be exact. There are traces of extraneous biological material throughout the wound that match insect chitin."
Emily stared at him. "A bug. He was shot in the head with a bug." Part of her wanted to call in Master/Stranger screening for him, but she knew he was serious. "So … the bug controller's involved?"
Armsmaster nodded. "Maybe also the bomb Tinker. If they can strap explosives to rats and birds, then they can attach micro-explosive charges to large bugs and turn them into ad hoc bullets."
"Great." So now she was going to have to watch out for bugs as well as rats and birds. "Is there a possibility that the bug was just sitting on Coil's head and someone shot it—and him—with an ordinary gun?"
"Not according to the guard who was in that cell, ma'am," Captain Hanson replied.
"Well … fuck." She massaged her temples. "Okay, fine. Get out of my office. Find Gallant. Find New Wave. Find everyone. Find someone who can fucking make sense of this shitshow." She paused, glaring at them both. "Why are you still here?"
"We're not, ma'am!" Captain Hanson could take a hint. He turned and quick-marched from the office, with Armsmaster not far behind him.
Emily slowly subsided into her chair again.
This fucking city.
This fucking job.
Laserdream
"Carefully, now."
Amy watched as Crystal used her force field to place Carol on the bed in what had to have been the mercenarys' infirmary. Carol was still asleep—a single finger-brush from Amy had reinforced that—and her face was much more relaxed, so she actually looked happy for once. Crystal did not plan to be in her immediate vicinity when she woke up; once she realised what was happening, things were likely to get apocalyptic.
"What are we going to do with her after this, Ames?" Crystal asked. It was an extremely valid question. "For that matter, how are we going to stop her from wrecking everything when Cranial tries to get a brain-scan off her? I'm absolutely certain that no amount of persuasion is going to get her to calm down and cooperate."
"I'm definitely not the one to ask about that." Amy frowned down at her mother. "She's the one person with the most viable memories Vicky needs to rebuild her personality. We can't just leave her out of this." She looked around, a look of panic crossing her face. "Shit, who's watching Vicky while everyone's out bringing the girls in?"
"Chill." Crystal put her hand on Amy's shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. "Dad's on duty there. He's handling it. We're all handling it."
"Right." To Crystal's concern, Amy was shaking slightly. "We're handling it. We have to handle it. We all have to handle it. When's Cranial get here, again?"
"Very shortly." That was Lisa, who'd just leaned in through the doorway. "Lady Photon and Shielder are on their way back in with Vicky's friends. Have you got a place to stick them until it's time to do the memory reading?"
"Several," Crystal said. "One problem, though. What do we tell them about tonight that won't drastically erode public confidence in Vicky, and New Wave as a whole?"
Lisa froze. "Shit," she whispered. "Are we going to have to mindwipe them, too?" She paused momentarily, as though going through options. "We're going to have to mindwipe them, too."
"Can we afford it, is the question." Crystal raised an eyebrow in Lisa's general direction. "I heard some of the language coming out of your mouth when you first got her price estimate."
"Uh …" Lisa stared off into the distance, her lips moving soundlessly. "That's a problem. That's a real problem. But if I chip in my own money, we can just about cover seven mindwipes."
"Fourteen," Crystal said. "Each of 'em has a parent coming to chaperone."
"Fuck!" yelled Lisa, so loudly and suddenly that both Crystal and Amy jumped. "We can't do it. The money won't cover it. Unless …" She looked hopefully at Amy.
"Nope." Amy shook her head definitively. "Who knows what'll fucking happen this time? I'm not going near anyone else's brains, ever."
Crystal tried to take Amy's hand, but the frizzy-haired brunette pulled away. "Ames—" Crystal began.
"Don't call me that!" snapped Amy. "Vicky calls me that." She hesitated, breathing deeply. "Just … just leave me alone for a bit. Let me think." Turning, she paced out of the infirmary.
"Well fucking done," Crystal observed, giving Lisa a well-deserved stink-eye. "For a high-powered Thinker, that was an absolutely brilliant effort at shooting yourself in the foot. Did you happen to use a laser sight?"
Lisa returned it, along with two raised middle fingers. "Well, fuck you too. I'm just trying to find solutions here. Can you think of another one?"
"Trying to pressure the one person who could do it clearly wasn't the right move." Crystal indicated Carol's supine form. "And how are we going to get her memories read without letting her wreck the whole show?"
"Maybe she doesn't need to be conscious?" hazarded Lisa. "I'll ask Cranial when she gets here."
"Yeah, you do that." Crystal ran her hand through her hair. "And while you're at it, see if she gives a bulk discount on mindwiping people."
"Words spoken by no superhero ever before today," snarked Lisa, and ducked out of the infirmary.
Her dig may have been spoken in jest, but it touched a nerve. Crystal found herself wondering if there was truth in there somewhere. Would superheroes kidnap people and actively attempt to mindwipe them, to save the good name of another hero?
After tonight, can I even call myself a hero?
She had no idea.
Tattletale
By the time Lisa spotted Aisha's bike coming into the underground parking lot, she was nearly ready to tear her own hair out with frustration. Taylor was still hanging on from behind, so Aisha hadn't quite managed to lose her yet. Maybe Taylor can pull some kind of Master bullshit out of her ass to make everyone okay with this shit.
Just as she got up to go and meet them at the garage entrance, the timer on her phone sounded. She was disoriented for a second, but then her memory kicked in. Cranial's here.
All of a sudden, her carefully constructed house of cards was looking more like a trash fire in the making. Getting Vicky back on deck was priority one; that was a guarantee. With the depths Amy was willing to sink to see that done, Lisa didn't want to see what would happen if the teenage biokinetic went all the way over the edge.
Stepping out onto the walkway, she spotted Amy brooding in the distance. "Aisha and Taylor are back!" she called out. "Go and let them in, okay?"
Amy gave a wave that could've meant anything, but at least she turned away in the correct direction. She seemed to get along well with the other girls, so hopefully she wasn't about to be a dick and leave them standing around out there. As for her attitude … well, Lisa had had to deal with worse in the past, so she was willing to let that part slide.
Heading to the stairs, she hurried down to the lower level. One of the walls had acquired a silvery-gray sheen that it didn't normally possess, and an obviously Tinkertech chair was already set up in the open area before it. As she watched, the wall shimmered and an almost cadaverously thin woman stepped through, pulling a couple of wheeled suitcases. She wore a white lab-coat over a black bodysuit with what looked like green brainwave traces here and there on it. A close-fitting helmet made her head look larger than it was, and her eyes were covered by a pair of heavy goggles.
"Hi," panted Lisa. "Good to meet you. Tattletale."
Cranial—because it couldn't be anyone else but her—rested her burdens carefully upright and gave Lisa a polite nod. "Hello. Interesting place you have here. Dodge was concerned when the coordinates you sent through looked like they were below ground level. Endbringer shelter?"
"Repurposed," Lisa confirmed, then looked around as a burly man in a flame-themed costume emerged from the shimmering wall, towing a heavy cart with something the size of a bar fridge on it. From the way the wheels rumbled over the concrete floor, it was somewhat more massive than a fridge. "So, what do you need?"
"Power supply, the more reliable the better," Cranial responded promptly. "Nobody to mess with my stuff while I'm here. And the more time I get to mesh everything together before re-implanting the gestalt, the better."
"Gotcha." Lisa recalled the problem with Carol. "Question. How well does the memory reading process work with someone who's unconscious?"
Cranial's mouth tightened. "It can be done, but if they're in REM sleep, it can throw off the recording. Especially if the subject is dreaming about what you're trying to extract a memory of."
Crap. Okay, figure out a way around that. Next problem. "Uh … I have fourteen people I'd really rather not remember much or any of this. What do you charge for memory erasures of the last few hours?"
"And there it is." Cranial laughed cynically. "Fourteen people? I can do it, but you'll have to render them unconscious immediately after the process so they don't start wondering where they are. Also, I'm charging my special 'last minute extra job' tax on that one."
The sinking feeling in Lisa's gut was like a black hole, sucking in everything around it. "So … no bulk discount then?" A quick exertion of her power told her exactly how much Cranial was going to charge her for the extra. It was more than the money she'd be able to raise, even if she maxed out her credit card.
"No such thing, in this trade." Cranial folded her arms, looking down at Lisa. "So, are we doing the mindwipes as well?"
They were between a rock and a hard place now. Trying to cancel the whole deal would lose half the money she'd pledged for the job, and Vicky's problems would still be unsolved. "No. Just the rest of it. What we agreed on." The words were bitter on her lips. She'd have to sort out the New Wave publicity problem some other way.
Cranial nodded, apparently satisfied with that. "Good. Power supply?"
That, at least, Lisa could deal with. "Over here." She led the way along to an unobtrusive closet and opened the door to reveal a switchboard with several power sockets of varying capability. "We're connected to city power, and we've got three generators ready to kick in if we lose that. The guy who set this place up was paranoid as hell, but he knew his business."
"So I see. Yes, I can definitely work with that." Cranial turned to Lisa. "I should be ready for the first subject in twenty minutes, half an hour at the outside."
Lisa frowned. "Huh. I thought you took something like four hours just to get ready."
"Hardly." Cranial snorted with dry amusement. "That's how long it generally takes me to be done and gone. I don't like travel jobs. That's why—"
"—you charge extra. Got it." Lisa nodded. "Okay, is there anything else you need? A snack? Water?"
"No. I brought my own. I've got it from here, thanks." Cranial gave her another nod, then turned and headed back to where the flame-costumed man was positioning the heavy cart next to the chair.
Lisa sighed, then clenched her fists tightly to try to get over the jitters. So much could still go wrong, but at least Cranial seemed to know what she was doing.
She'd better. This is our best, last hope to avoid Amypocalypse.
Panacea
"Aisha and Taylor are back! Go and let them in, okay?"
Amy had nearly told Lisa to go fuck herself right then and there, but decided against it. The once-blonde-now-redhead was working her ass off to help Vicky, so they were on the same side for the moment. Still, the anger had surged when Lisa had silently suggested that she fuck up some other people's brains just to make life easier for New Wave after the fact. She didn't give two flying fucks about New Wave. It was Vicky she cared about: first, last and always.
Muttering under her breath, she stomped along the passageway to the door barring Taylor and Aisha from entering, and slapped the open button. It slid aside, and the pair came in; Taylor walking sedately, and Aisha almost dancing with suppressed energy. And then, a dozen birds flew through the closing doors, and perched on Taylor's arms and shoulders when she stopped walking.
Amy frowned. Not at the birds; that was Taylor's thing, these days. But both the newcomers were carrying tightly packed shopping bags, and Amy was almost certain Lisa hadn't sent them out to buy stuff. "Okay, what's this about?" she asked.
"Dealing with a potential problem," Taylor explained. "While we were out and about, making sure the PRT didn't spot Sarah and Eric picking up the partygoers, Aisha had a brainwave."
"Because I'm a fuckin' genius," Aisha boasted proudly. "Sure, we got all these people providin' their memory stuff for the Vickster to get her brainmeats back in order, but what happens when they all go back to school an' stuff, talkin' about how they all got kidnapped an' made to do this stuff? It'd blow up hotter'n Behemoth's asshole after a handful of Carolina Reapers."
Amy nodded. "Lisa was talking about that." She grimaced. "Wanted me to wipe their minds, after."
"Ah, no, fuck that shit." Aisha shook her head vigorously. "After what's already happened? Stupidest idea ever, an' I know bad decisions. I make 'em all the damn time."
"Thank you," Amy said, feeling somewhat mollified. "So, what's your solution?"
"One second," Taylor said, gesturing down the passageway with a nod of her head. "Lisa's on the way. Don't want to have to explain all this twice."
Tattletale
Hustling along the passageway, Lisa registered the shopping bags, but decided to temporarily ignore them. "It's about time. Where've you two been? Sarah and Eric will be back at any time, and we're going to have our hands full after that, keeping Vicky's friends quiet."
Aisha shook her head, beaming all over her face. "Nope. We got all that sorted. Figured you mighta maybe forgot about afterward, so we did a couple of detours along the way."
"Detours?" Lisa wanted to use her power to demystify what Aisha was saying, but she was edging too close to a Thinker headache as it was. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Lisa." Taylor's voice was calm, even as they walked rapidly back toward the main open area of the base. "Chill. Aisha's actually got it figured out. And Sarah and Eric are taking the slow way back, so we've got time to get set up."
"Get set up?" Lisa stared at her, then at the bags, as Taylor lifted one by way of illustration. "Get what set up? What are those, anyway? Why did you waste time going shopping?"
It was clear Aisha was enjoying herself far too much. "So, got a question for you. Suppose there's a bunch of kids and adults who've told they're coming to a party, but in actual fact they've been kidnapped to provide memories so a superhero can get her life back together. What's the best way to make sure they don't start gossiping to everyone all around 'em about it, afterward?"
Amy, who had been slouching along with the rest of them, took the bait before Lisa could. "Okay, how?"
"Well, duh." Aisha gave her a grin about three degrees more smug than Lisa had ever seen in the mirror. "We tell 'em that's exactly what we're doing … but we present it as the party theme."
Lisa blinked as those seven words changed the whole scenario. "Holy shit," she breathed. "Aisha, you're a fucking genius. They'll play along because they think it's just part of the theme."
"Exactly." Taylor hefted one of her bags. "So, can we find a place to get all this set up? I swear, my arms are three inches longer."
Lisa nodded. "Sure. Uh … where'd you get all the party stuff from, anyway?" The bags looked very full.
"Here an' there," Aisha said with a sly grin. "It's amazing what places you'll find open at this time of night."
"Wait," Amy said. "How'd you pay for it all? Please tell me you didn't shoplift all that stuff." Her tone indicated that she would find it highly amusing if such was the case.
"Some of it, yeah," Aisha admitted easily. "The rest of it? We maxed out Lisa's credit card."
"My credit—" Lisa made a grab for her pocket. Her wallet wasn't there. "What the fuck? When did you take that?"
"On the way out the door." Aisha grinned impudently. "Had a notion I might need it."
"Focus!" Taylor snapped, raising her voice. "Party. Setup. Now."
"Right, right." Lisa gave Aisha a glower that promised this wasn't over yet. "This way."
"Woo!" Aisha whooped. "Par-tay in the hizzouse!"
Lisa facepalmed. "Aisha, I will forgive you for the credit card if you never, ever say that again."
As they moved off, Amy fell in alongside Taylor. "Okay, so you've got that problem sorted. We've got a bigger one, though." She raised her voice slightly. "Lisa, what'd Cranial say about Carol?"
"That it would be a whole lot easier if she wasn't asleep." Lisa took one of Aisha's bags from her and started looking through it. "Shit, did you just grab everything on the shelf and shove it in here?"
"Pretty much," Aisha confirmed proudly.
"So yeah," Amy said to Taylor. "Can you or the resident genius there figure out how to get Carol processed through without making the party totally weird?"
Taylor paused for a moment. "Depends. Can you make a very specific bug for me?"
They spoke some more, but Lisa tuned them out. If they were working on a solution, that was good enough for her. Right now, she had a party to set up.
Lady Photon
Ten Minutes Later
Sarah and Eric swooped down to where Aisha had told them to go. "And here we are, folks. On the first step of your superhero/supervillain party experience. Are we ready to venture into the unknown?"
The girls and their parents looked around a little dubiously, for which she didn't blame them. This was literally a construction site, with an open trapdoor in the ground providing the sole entrance. Bethany's mother Constance raised her hand. "Are we supposed to be—"
"Heyyyy!" At that moment, Aisha popped her head out of the open trapdoor, shining a flashlight up under her face to throw most of it into eerie shadow. "Whoa, hey, it's the heroes! Get on down here, so we can thwart the dastardly plans of the eeeeevil supervillain Mind-Melter, right under his ugly-ass nose!"
Sarah wasn't sure whether it was her bouncy presentation or the utter campiness of what she was saying, but the girls all crowded toward the entrance. One by one, they climbed down into the dimly lit passageway, Sarah following behind the last one. When she got to the bottom, Vicky's friends were clustered around Aisha, who was handing out domino masks.
"Gotta have your masks, folks. Heroes gotta wear masks, so the villains can't learn who they are." She briefly shone the flashlight in her own face, to show the purple-glitter mask she was wearing. "Come on, mask up, and let's get this par-tay started!"
With all the masks secured in place, they proceeded along the tunnel, with Aisha cheerfully reciting a total line of bullshit about the faux 'Mind-Melter' and his 'reign of terror' over the city. Sarah was ninety-nine percent sure the girl was just making it up off the top of her head, but she was almost as fascinated as the others. Aisha, she decided, had a distinct future as a con artist if she were so inclined.
When they reached the other end, the way was barred by a tall figure, crawling with bugs and speaking in an eerie buzzing monotone. Sarah recognised it as Taylor, but only because she'd met the girl before. In full light, the creepiness factor would've been considerable; where they were, the dim light only allowed for flashes of reflection off of a million crawling carapaces, enhancing it considerably.
"Stop where you are," buzzed the monstrosity before them, holding out a hand dripping with bugs. "I am the Hive Queen Swarmina! Only those loyal to my master, Mind-Melter, may pass! Are you loyal?"
"Of course we're loyal!" Aisha stated boldly. "No heroes here. We're all loyal minions of Mind-Melter, aren't we, guys?" At the same time, she nodded her head in an exaggerated motion.
It only took them a second or so to catch on, then a chorus of, "Yes", "Sure", "Totally", came back from the girls. Sarah was impressed; with each time she got them to do what she said, Aisha was drawing them deeper into the roleplay.
"Very well. You may enter the domain of Mind-Melter." 'Swarmina' stood aside and hit a control, opening a sliding door and allowing them to enter the base proper. More than one shied away from Taylor, who merely stood there and buzzed at them.
"Whoa …" murmured Eric from beside Sarah as they stepped through in their turn. "They've been busy."
His comment was entirely justified. Streamers were strung up everywhere, along with cape-themed festive banners. Hanging from the ceiling was what Sarah tentatively identified as an inflatable disco ball, throwing glittery lights back all over the massive interior space. Tables and chairs had been dragged in from who knew where, with finger foods and bottles of pop set up next to stacks of paper cups and plates.
"Okay then, gather around," said Aisha in a stage whisper as music started playing across the PA system. "This is the deal. Mind-Melter has captured Glory Girl, and is planning to make her into a mindless zombie with his Mind-Melter chair down there." Stepping over to the rail, she pointed down toward where Cranial (Sarah had never met her, but the woman in the lab coat couldn't be anyone else) was setting up her equipment.
"Well, why don't we just destroy the chair then?" asked one of the girls in a smug I've-thought-of-a-solution-you-haven't tone. Sarah disliked her already.
"Because Mind-Melter has a guard," Aisha said, pointing out a guy wearing a flame-themed costume and hefting a bulky-looking rifle. "And we don't want to blow our cover. So, we're going to do something a ton more devious. While Swarmina's watching us—" she pointed to where Taylor had entered through the sliding door, "—we can't do anything, but when she leaves the room, one of you guys goes down there and tells Mind-Melter's minion that you're here to test the chair. While you're in the chair, you concentrate on all your best wishes for Glory Girl. This means that once you've all put your best wishes in there and she gets placed in the chair, instead of being zombified, she'll be made strong enough to defeat Mind-Melter with all your strengths combined. Got it?"
Again, it was the most basic of Saturday morning cartoon plots, but already Sarah could see the girls nodding in agreement. Pretending to be heroes, thwarting a supervillain, and having a party at the same time … it was simple, easy and fun. Plus, of course, the base itself and the Tinkertech chair made for amazing props.
The girls gathered around the tables and got their glasses of pop, Constance sought Sarah out. "Is that … is that chair safe?" she asked quietly, swivelling her eyes sideways to where Cranial was causing lights to run up and down the frame of the chair. "I mean, it's not going to do anything really, is it?"
And that's why overly realistic props are a bad thing. Sarah sighed internally. "It won't do a thing to them. In fact, I'll be going down there myself in about thirty seconds, just to show the kids how it's done." She turned and caught Taylor's eye as the bug-covered girl drifted through the crowd, then gave her a slight nod.
Returning the gesture, Taylor turned and headed out through another doorway. Accordingly, the music changed from the latest teen hit to an old classic; the Mission Impossible theme. Feeling like an idiot but determined to make this work, Sarah mimed sneaking onto the stairway down, pausing at the landing to peer around with exaggerated caution. When she got to the bottom, she darted across the open floor, pulled an entirely unnecessary shoulder-roll (aided considerably by her flight) to applause from those watching above, and arrived at Cranial's chair.
"I am here to test the chair!" she announced, loudly enough for all to hear.
To her credit, Cranial didn't burst out laughing. "Sure," she agreed, with the most wooden acting Sarah had ever seen. "You can 'test' the chair. Go ahead and sit down."
Sarah took her seat, not without a little trepidation. The helmet slid down over her head, and the opaque visor dropped into place. "Should I concentrate on Glory Girl?" she asked quietly.
"No," Cranial said, much more naturally. "Just let your mind drift. I'll take care of the rest."
Let my mind drift, hah. I'd love to see you do that right now. Sarah's brain was darting in a dozen different directions at once, but she took a deep breath and forced calm on herself. Victoria needs me right now, more than ever. I have to do this for her.
And then the visor slid up and Cranial lifted the helmet away. "Okay, done."
"Wait … that's it?" Sarah had expected to be there for minutes on end, not thirty seconds at most.
"Well, yeah. It's a simple scan-and-copy. It's not like I was stitching anything in there." Cranial's tone was matter-of-fact. "You can get up now."
"Right. Uh, thanks." Sarah got up from the chair to more applause from the people lining the rail above.
"Don't thank me, hon. Thank Tattletale. She's the one bankrolling this job."
When this is over, I'm giving Lisa the biggest hug. Sarah made her way back up to the balcony, arriving at the top of the stairs just in time for the triumphant flourish in the music. She nodded to Constance. "And that's how easy it is."
"Whoa ..." That was Bethany, crowding up alongside her mom. "Can I go next? Mom, can I?"
Constance glanced at Sarah, who gave her a reassuring nod. "I suppose you can," she allowed, and Sarah let out a tiny sigh of relief. They could probably get by even if one or two of Vicky's friends refused to donate memories (not that they knew exactly what the chair was about) but the more, the better.
Once Cranial was ready for her next subject, she turned and looked up towards the ongoing party. Again, Taylor (in her guise as 'Swarmina') nonchalantly wandered out of the area, and the music changed to another action-charged piece. Sarah gave Bethany a tiny nudge. "Go," she whispered.
With everyone watching, the teen crept down the stairs and scuttled across to where Cranial waited. Sarah watched curiously, interested in what the process looked like from the outside. Cranial didn't disappoint; lights rippled up and down the frame of the chair, and over the surface of the helmet. But the process seemed even shorter than it had with her. Maybe ten seconds passed before Cranial was raising the visor and ushering Bethany out of the chair.
More spontaneous applause arose as Bethany hurried back across and climbed the stairs to rejoin her peers. They crowded around her, asking what it had been like. Sarah wasn't close enough to hear the answer, and she turned away to see how everything else was going.
Aisha had vanished, most likely to relieve Neil on taking-care-of-Vicky duty, so everything was running smoothly on that front as well. Now, all we need is a solution to the Carol problem …
Taylor
Okay, let's see how this goes.
It was weird pretending to pretend to be a villainous minion. Walking slowly through the crowd, covered in bugs, I watched the partygoers edge away from me but smile at the same time; they were miming fear, but knew I wasn't a real villain. However, with the three-sixty-degree awareness the bugs gave me, I could move around without actually looking where I was going.
This was good, because my main attention was on two of the three other bugs that had been perching on a shelf in the infirmary since Amy created them. At my command, they took wing and buzzed over toward where Brandish lay asleep on the bed. Landing side by side on her bare arm, they arched their backs and extruded two long sharp stingers. When the first one plunged its stinger into a vein, Brandish barely twitched. I sent that bug back to the shelf once it was done, then told the second one to inject its payload as well.
After that, I made it rejoin its friends and they all sat there watching Brandish. Their eyesight was terrible, but at least I could make out basic shape and light. On the bed, Carol Dallon stirred; I felt the ghost of her nervous system as she woke up. Her eyes inched open, but she flopped onto her back and didn't move. Staring at the ceiling, blinking every now and again, she wasn't asleep but neither was she exactly awake, courtesy of the strong hypnotic injected by the first bug.
It was never easy for me to affect people, but I could … barely. If they had any strong impulses, they could easily override my commands. It usually took Regent's natural indolence or someone just not caring for me to make them do what I want.
But in the semi-waking state Carol Dallon was in, she was barely experiencing the world, and cared even less. I could use my tenuous hold on her nervous system to sit her up and swing her legs over the side of the bed. It would've been better if she'd been in costume, but I could only work with what I had.
As 'Swarmina' (I suspected I was never going to live that name down) I deliberately turned my back on Cranial and the Tinkertech chair. I wasn't sure how people would react to seeing Carol Dallon in civilian clothing, but Amy was right. Her memories of Vicky were central to the whole situation.
Laserdream
Crystal knew Taylor would walk 'offstage' and use a bug to signal Lisa to change the music once Cranial was ready for another subject. Cranial was indeed ready, but 'Swarmina' didn't seem about to make herself scarce, and the music never changed. However, someone was crossing the floor, down below.
When Crystal recognised who it was, she blinked twice before accepting what her eyes were telling her. Holy shit, it's Aunt Carol. Taylor and Amy pulled it off!
She wasn't overly thrilled about having Taylor puppet her aunt, but considering the alternatives, this was what her father usually called 'the least worst option'. "Shhh," she said theatrically. "Brandish has infiltrated the base! Mind-Melter can't possibly win now!"
The crowd fell silent and everyone pushed up to the rail. 'Swarmina' resolutely kept looking in the other direction as Crystal's aunt reached Cranial and spoke the same phrase. She was seated in the chair, and the process began. Crystal found herself digging her nails into her palm. Please, please, please let this work.
It took nearly a minute and a half, and Crystal got the impression some people were holding their breaths, before Cranial raised the visor and removed the helmet. And then, when Aunt Carol got up off the chair, she stumbled. Crystal tried not to gasp out loud.
As Aunt Carol tried to head back the way she'd come, she stumbled again, and shook her head. Crystal had a bad feeling about what that meant. Oh, shit. She's coming out of it.
"Hey, Swarmina!" shouted Eric, drawing all eyes. "Were you hatched from a cocoon, or are you so ugly that bugs just love you?"
"That is not a funny joke," Taylor responded with the monotone buzz. "You are not a nice boy."
As everyone laughed, Crystal vaulted over the rail and flew down to where her aunt was leaning against the wall. Her eyes focused, and there was real intent in them. "Where am I?" hissed Aunt Carol. "What's going on here? Who are these people?"
"It's all good," Crystal said soothingly. "Here, let me—"
"No!" Carol pulled away from her. "I'm staying right here, and I want answers."
Crystal acted on instinct; throwing a bubble around Carol, she took off flying at her best speed. With any luck, Eric's banter with Taylor had gotten everyone's attention, and nobody would think this was too unusual. On the other hand, she'd certainly gotten Aunt Carol's attention.
"Hey!" her aunt shouted, her voice thankfully muffled by the force field. "Let me out of this! Put me down right this moment, young lady!"
"Not until you listen," insisted Crystal. "There's stuff you don't know—"
Just in time, she saw the glowing blade ignite inside the force field bubble and lash out toward her. It could cut through most materials; Eric's field was strong enough to defend against it, but hers wasn't. Stopping on the spot, she let Carol out of the field, then backed up. They were only a short distance from the infirmary …
"Start talking." There was something in Carol's eyes that wasn't entirely sane. "Are you my niece, or just someone who looks like her? Where is my daughter?" The blade crackled softly. Crystal smelled ozone.
"Vicky's going to be just fine—"
Carol stepped closer. "Going to be?" Then she stopped; eyes widening, she reached back over her shoulder. "What have you done?"
"Aunt Carol—" Crystal watched the glowing blade as it waved back and forth across the corridor. With her other hand, Carol scrabbled at her back. Then finally what she hoped was the third bug's knockout dose took hold, and Carol sank to one knee. Her eyes were still blazing, even as her body failed her, and she tried to lash out with the blade. Fortunately, it only travelled about six inches toward Crystal before it winked out and Carol fell on her face.
Crystal breathed heavily, leaning on her knees and hoping she wasn't about to throw up, then looked at the bug that took flight from Carol's back, heading toward the infirmary. Thank fuck Taylor was on the ball. Mom is never gonna believe this.
Calling up her force field again, she scooped her aunt up and headed toward the infirmary. With any luck they'd be done and dusted, and Vicky would be mentally whole, before Carol woke up again.
Let's hope that's the last of the drama. I can't deal with any more of this shit.
Circus
The metal around the lock glowed red-hot as she discarded the last of the road flares. She had to admit; the ventilation system in this cell was pretty damn good for something that had ducts measuring about two inches square. Flexible she was, but not that damn flexible.
Now all she had to do was wait until the door cooled down enough, and she'd have the lock picked. And then …
Tattletale, you bitch. I'm coming for you.
End of Part Thirteen
Part Thirteen: Make Your Own Luck
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Toybox
Cranial
"… okay, just reminding you, this is going to be a premium-rate job," Lil warned. "Seventy-five percent up front, and I keep fifty percent even if it falls through."
The girl on the other end of the phone call sighed; more in resignation than anything else, Lil judged. "Yeah, got it. Is there any way we can bring that down a little? I can cover it, but any discount's a good discount, you know?"
This was familiar ground for Lil, but she had to go over it every single time. "You could come to me instead of me going to you. That would zero out the travel cost and halve the security outlay. Reducing the number of memory sets I'm going to have to juggle would knock it down some as well. And I always charge more for involving unwilling subjects. My gear is delicate."
"You're just reading from them, not implanting memories. And most of them aren't capes, so there's a lot less chance of damaging your equipment." Tattletale was clearly trying to be persuasive. "And we can't tell them what's up, because—"
"Listen, I don't care about your hero-villain bullshit," Lil said impatiently. "The one who's getting the memory implant, the cape. Is she fully cognizant and aware of what's going to happen, and in full agreement with it?"
"Ah." It seemed Tattletale was finally on the same page. "Well, she's not against it, and it should be relatively easy to get her to sit still for the procedure—"
"Not the same thing." Lil had learned to be blunt, because otherwise people kept thinking they could argue her around. "If you can't cut any of that back, then the price stands. Can you pay?"
This time, the sigh was all resignation. "I'm sending the Number Man the authorisation to verify my ability to pay. He should be contacting you soon."
"Good." Lil banked with the Number Man herself. When it came to money matters, he was the platinum standard. "Once I've got that, I'll contact you back and arrange for my arrival there. Just remember: if there's any interruptions in the memory withdrawal or implantation process, it can easily cause ongoing problems later on. So security has to be rock-solid at your end."
"Wait, I thought you said I was paying for you to arrange security."
Lil rolled her eyes. "My security will be there to protect me and my equipment, and ensure I can duck and run if I have to. Your security will be there to make sure nobody interrupts, and to ensure I don't have to duck and run. Can you arrange that?"
Tattletale muttered something about 'pound of flesh closest to my heart' but didn't protest more strenuously. "Yeah, we got this. Several capes on site with a strong motivation for this to succeed. Good enough?"
"We'll have to see, won't we? I'll call you back once Number Man's contacted me." Lil ended the call then sat back, rubbing her forehead.
It sounded like a weird job. She didn't like weird jobs. They went places she wasn't necessarily comfortable with, there were usually complications of one sort or another, and the clients nearly always managed to avoid passing on details that would've been handy to know before commencement.
But she'd set her prices high for a reason, and she had no actual excuse for turning this one down. Plus, one of the drawcards for Toybox was that they got the job done. This was one of the reasons people kept coming back. And having a bad feeling about something wasn't necessarily a solid reason to drop it sight unseen.
Anyway, that was why she'd demanded extra for security.
Standing up, she headed out of her lab into the common area. Glace was there, watching TV with a hot chocolate in hand. "Hey," her fellow Tinker greeted her. "That job come through?"
Lil nodded. "Yeah. Premium rates, too."
"Woo!" Glace pumped her fist in the air. One-third of all fees got shared with the other members of Toybox; it was in their charter. So a win for one was a win for all. "Nicely done."
"Thanks. Dodge and Pyrotechnical around?"
"In their labs, as far as I know. Let me know how it turns out." Glace went back to watching TV.
"Will do." Lil moved on and poked her head into Dodge's workshop.
The kid was doing something finicky with a circuit-board, so she waited. Eventually, he straightened up from the magnifier, which she took as an opportunity to clear her throat. It was better, in her opinion, to not startle her colleagues while they were messing with things that could bend the very fabric of space-time into a pretzel.
"Oh, hi," he said, glancing around. "What's up?"
"That transport job I told you about the other day. Can we be ready to roll in thirty minutes?" With the amount of work ahead of her, it was going to take a while to get set up at the far end, and she wanted plenty of wiggle room.
His eyes went distant behind his goggles for a moment. "Uh, sure. Just your travel chair?"
"Plus a dozen or so extra memory modules and the processor unit," she said, and grimaced. "It's one of those complicated jobs." She was going to have to work hard to make sure all the modules she needed were in working order and packed safely for the trip to Brockton Bay, but that was why she'd arranged for the wiggle room.
"Wait, how are we carrying the modules?" Dodge looked momentarily worried. "They're fairly heavy, aren't they?"
"And fragile," Lil confirmed. Normally, when people came to her, she had a throne-like affair she sat the subjects down in, with a full sense-dep helmet that came down over the head onto the shoulders. It was only portable in the technical sense, requiring a forklift or pallet-jack to move it from one place to another. It also incorporated enough built-in memory modules to store the full brain-scans of two dozen people. "But I'm going to ask Pyrotechnical to come along as security, so he can maybe give us a hand."
Her 'travel chair' was a lot lighter (and more fragile), but had the supreme advantage of weighing not much more than a standard office chair. The helmet that came with it only covered the top half of the head with an opaque drop-down visor; Glace had jokingly likened it to a hairdresser's drying accessory, so now they called it the Hair Dryer as an in-joke. Its one big drawback was that it held no integral memory modules, but those could easily be carried along and plugged in. However, as Dodge had noted, they were heavy (and fragile).
"Yeah, that'll help," Dodge agreed. He put his thumb to his lips and chewed on the nail for a moment. "With everything we need to take along, the eight-by-eight is too small. We'll go with the sixteen instead. Roller bags for the modules?"
"Mm-hmm," Lil said distractedly. The memory processing unit (there was no way she could merge all those memories into one gestalt without it) was going to be an absolute beast to transport across; it was as heavy as a dozen memory modules all by itself, and a lot bulkier. "Didn't we have a cart of some sort that I can move the processor on?"
"Maybe," Dodge allowed dubiously. By the very nature of his specialty, he rarely needed mechanical assistance to move things from one place to another. "Or you could get Big Rig to throw one together for you."
"That's an idea." Lil nodded in agreement. "I'll get back to you in fifteen." She strolled on to Pyrotechnical's lab. "Hey, remember that job I asked if you could provide security for …?"
<><>
Circus
"Wait a minute."
She'd lost count of the number of times she'd tried to pick this lock, and failed. Over and over again, she'd been on the very edge of success when something happened, and her efforts undid themselves. But this time she'd heard it: the tiny click of one piece of metal snapping to another.
There was only one thing which could make that specific noise. "Magnets …" she breathed. "Coil, you slimy, tricky, motherfucking asshole." Keys, by definition, were made to fit precisely into the inner space of the lock, allowing no extraneous movement. The lock was designed to actively resist being picked by way of strategically placed magnets. It was the only explanation. Coil's keys also probably had magnets built into them, just to make sure of things; he was tricky like that.
If he wasn't already dead, I'd kill him myself.
She pulled a road flare out of her hammer-space and ignited it, then directed the heat into the lock, concentrating it there as hard as she could. It wouldn't melt the metal—if that was even a possibility, she would've blowtorched the door off its hinges long ago—but magnets didn't like heat, not even a little bit. And once the magnets were no longer magnets, she could pick the damn lock as per normal.
It was going to take a little while, she knew. Road flares didn't generate all that much heat, and she'd still have to wait for the whole thing to cool down afterward before she could start picking it again. But by the time she was finished with this lock, the magnets were going to be fucked, and that was all she needed.
Tattletale, when I get out of here, I'm going to kill you, just because.
<><>
PRT ENE Director's Office
Director Emily Piggot
Not for the first time, Emily decided it was a good thing that she was incapable of triggering with powers. Because with the sheer seething rage she felt right now, the top half of the PRT building would've been a smoking ruin if she had. Standing as straight as she could, knuckles planted on her desk, she glowered at both Armsmaster and the PRT captain who had brought her the bad news.
"How the fuck could this have happened?" It was only via the most stringent application of self-control that she didn't raise her voice, or start swearing non-stop. God knew, she wanted to do both. "You both agreed it was a good plan. You had four people in that house, apart from Brandish and Manpower! Yet somehow, someone infiltrated the house, drugged everyone, then spirited both New Wave capes out of the house, and our outside surveillance teams didn't see a damn thing. Can someone please explain this egregious fuckup to me in terms I can understand? Because unless you can, the phrases 'extreme negligence' and 'dereliction of duty' are going to be highlighted and underlined in my report on this matter."
Captain Hanson straightened his back an extra couple of degrees, even though he was already at attention. "Ma'am, I have been speaking to my teams, and they were awake and alert the whole time. Robertson says that Manpower offered to make the coffee himself. The only person who could've drugged it was … well, him."
Which opened a whole new can of worms. Emily shook her head. "Why would Manpower deliberately drug the people guarding him?"
"There's a Master involved," Armsmaster said, his voice flat with certainty. "There has to be. Also, I've got some interesting information that's only just come to light. First: the cameras belonging to the surveillance teams were blocked at very specific intervals by moths and other night-time insects. I've analysed the footage and picked out hints that a vehicle drove through that area at that time, but it's impossible to get any sort of make or model, much less an image of the driver. Second: the autopsy on Coil came back. He was shot in the head, alright. But what he was shot with was a bug. Some sort of large beetle, to be exact. There are traces of extraneous biological material throughout the wound that match insect chitin."
Emily stared at him. "A bug. He was shot in the head with a bug." Part of her wanted to call in Master/Stranger screening for him, but she knew he was serious. "So … the bug controller's involved?"
Armsmaster nodded. "Maybe also the bomb Tinker. If they can strap explosives to rats and birds, then they can attach micro-explosive charges to large bugs and turn them into ad hoc bullets."
"Great." So now she was going to have to watch out for bugs as well as rats and birds. "Is there a possibility that the bug was just sitting on Coil's head and someone shot it—and him—with an ordinary gun?"
"Not according to the guard who was in that cell, ma'am," Captain Hanson replied.
"Well … fuck." She massaged her temples. "Okay, fine. Get out of my office. Find Gallant. Find New Wave. Find everyone. Find someone who can fucking make sense of this shitshow." She paused, glaring at them both. "Why are you still here?"
"We're not, ma'am!" Captain Hanson could take a hint. He turned and quick-marched from the office, with Armsmaster not far behind him.
Emily slowly subsided into her chair again.
This fucking city.
This fucking job.
<><>
Laserdream
"Carefully, now."
Amy watched as Crystal used her force field to place Carol on the bed in what had to have been the mercenarys' infirmary. Carol was still asleep—a single finger-brush from Amy had reinforced that—and her face was much more relaxed, so she actually looked happy for once. Crystal did not plan to be in her immediate vicinity when she woke up; once she realised what was happening, things were likely to get apocalyptic.
"What are we going to do with her after this, Ames?" Crystal asked. It was an extremely valid question. "For that matter, how are we going to stop her from wrecking everything when Cranial tries to get a brain-scan off her? I'm absolutely certain that no amount of persuasion is going to get her to calm down and cooperate."
"I'm definitely not the one to ask about that." Amy frowned down at her mother. "She's the one person with the most viable memories Vicky needs to rebuild her personality. We can't just leave her out of this." She looked around, a look of panic crossing her face. "Shit, who's watching Vicky while everyone's out bringing the girls in?"
"Chill." Crystal put her hand on Amy's shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. "Dad's on duty there. He's handling it. We're all handling it."
"Right." To Crystal's concern, Amy was shaking slightly. "We're handling it. We have to handle it. We all have to handle it. When's Cranial get here, again?"
"Very shortly." That was Lisa, who'd just leaned in through the doorway. "Lady Photon and Shielder are on their way back in with Vicky's friends. Have you got a place to stick them until it's time to do the memory reading?"
"Several," Crystal said. "One problem, though. What do we tell them about tonight that won't drastically erode public confidence in Vicky, and New Wave as a whole?"
Lisa froze. "Shit," she whispered. "Are we going to have to mindwipe them, too?" She paused momentarily, as though going through options. "We're going to have to mindwipe them, too."
"Can we afford it, is the question." Crystal raised an eyebrow in Lisa's general direction. "I heard some of the language coming out of your mouth when you first got her price estimate."
"Uh …" Lisa stared off into the distance, her lips moving soundlessly. "That's a problem. That's a real problem. But if I chip in my own money, we can just about cover seven mindwipes."
"Fourteen," Crystal said. "Each of 'em has a parent coming to chaperone."
"Fuck!" yelled Lisa, so loudly and suddenly that both Crystal and Amy jumped. "We can't do it. The money won't cover it. Unless …" She looked hopefully at Amy.
"Nope." Amy shook her head definitively. "Who knows what'll fucking happen this time? I'm not going near anyone else's brains, ever."
Crystal tried to take Amy's hand, but the frizzy-haired brunette pulled away. "Ames—" Crystal began.
"Don't call me that!" snapped Amy. "Vicky calls me that." She hesitated, breathing deeply. "Just … just leave me alone for a bit. Let me think." Turning, she paced out of the infirmary.
"Well fucking done," Crystal observed, giving Lisa a well-deserved stink-eye. "For a high-powered Thinker, that was an absolutely brilliant effort at shooting yourself in the foot. Did you happen to use a laser sight?"
Lisa returned it, along with two raised middle fingers. "Well, fuck you too. I'm just trying to find solutions here. Can you think of another one?"
"Trying to pressure the one person who could do it clearly wasn't the right move." Crystal indicated Carol's supine form. "And how are we going to get her memories read without letting her wreck the whole show?"
"Maybe she doesn't need to be conscious?" hazarded Lisa. "I'll ask Cranial when she gets here."
"Yeah, you do that." Crystal ran her hand through her hair. "And while you're at it, see if she gives a bulk discount on mindwiping people."
"Words spoken by no superhero ever before today," snarked Lisa, and ducked out of the infirmary.
Her dig may have been spoken in jest, but it touched a nerve. Crystal found herself wondering if there was truth in there somewhere. Would superheroes kidnap people and actively attempt to mindwipe them, to save the good name of another hero?
After tonight, can I even call myself a hero?
She had no idea.
<><>
Tattletale
By the time Lisa spotted Aisha's bike coming into the underground parking lot, she was nearly ready to tear her own hair out with frustration. Taylor was still hanging on from behind, so Aisha hadn't quite managed to lose her yet. Maybe Taylor can pull some kind of Master bullshit out of her ass to make everyone okay with this shit.
Just as she got up to go and meet them at the garage entrance, the timer on her phone sounded. She was disoriented for a second, but then her memory kicked in. Cranial's here.
All of a sudden, her carefully constructed house of cards was looking more like a trash fire in the making. Getting Vicky back on deck was priority one; that was a guarantee. With the depths Amy was willing to sink to see that done, Lisa didn't want to see what would happen if the teenage biokinetic went all the way over the edge.
Stepping out onto the walkway, she spotted Amy brooding in the distance. "Aisha and Taylor are back!" she called out. "Go and let them in, okay?"
Amy gave a wave that could've meant anything, but at least she turned away in the correct direction. She seemed to get along well with the other girls, so hopefully she wasn't about to be a dick and leave them standing around out there. As for her attitude … well, Lisa had had to deal with worse in the past, so she was willing to let that part slide.
Heading to the stairs, she hurried down to the lower level. One of the walls had acquired a silvery-gray sheen that it didn't normally possess, and an obviously Tinkertech chair was already set up in the open area before it. As she watched, the wall shimmered and an almost cadaverously thin woman stepped through, pulling a couple of wheeled suitcases. She wore a white lab-coat over a black bodysuit with what looked like green brainwave traces here and there on it. A close-fitting helmet made her head look larger than it was, and her eyes were covered by a pair of heavy goggles.
"Hi," panted Lisa. "Good to meet you. Tattletale."
Cranial—because it couldn't be anyone else but her—rested her burdens carefully upright and gave Lisa a polite nod. "Hello. Interesting place you have here. Dodge was concerned when the coordinates you sent through looked like they were below ground level. Endbringer shelter?"
"Repurposed," Lisa confirmed, then looked around as a burly man in a flame-themed costume emerged from the shimmering wall, towing a heavy cart with something the size of a bar fridge on it. From the way the wheels rumbled over the concrete floor, it was somewhat more massive than a fridge. "So, what do you need?"
"Power supply, the more reliable the better," Cranial responded promptly. "Nobody to mess with my stuff while I'm here. And the more time I get to mesh everything together before re-implanting the gestalt, the better."
"Gotcha." Lisa recalled the problem with Carol. "Question. How well does the memory reading process work with someone who's unconscious?"
Cranial's mouth tightened. "It can be done, but if they're in REM sleep, it can throw off the recording. Especially if the subject is dreaming about what you're trying to extract a memory of."
Crap. Okay, figure out a way around that. Next problem. "Uh … I have fourteen people I'd really rather not remember much or any of this. What do you charge for memory erasures of the last few hours?"
"And there it is." Cranial laughed cynically. "Fourteen people? I can do it, but you'll have to render them unconscious immediately after the process so they don't start wondering where they are. Also, I'm charging my special 'last minute extra job' tax on that one."
The sinking feeling in Lisa's gut was like a black hole, sucking in everything around it. "So … no bulk discount then?" A quick exertion of her power told her exactly how much Cranial was going to charge her for the extra. It was more than the money she'd be able to raise, even if she maxed out her credit card.
"No such thing, in this trade." Cranial folded her arms, looking down at Lisa. "So, are we doing the mindwipes as well?"
They were between a rock and a hard place now. Trying to cancel the whole deal would lose half the money she'd pledged for the job, and Vicky's problems would still be unsolved. "No. Just the rest of it. What we agreed on." The words were bitter on her lips. She'd have to sort out the New Wave publicity problem some other way.
Cranial nodded, apparently satisfied with that. "Good. Power supply?"
That, at least, Lisa could deal with. "Over here." She led the way along to an unobtrusive closet and opened the door to reveal a switchboard with several power sockets of varying capability. "We're connected to city power, and we've got three generators ready to kick in if we lose that. The guy who set this place up was paranoid as hell, but he knew his business."
"So I see. Yes, I can definitely work with that." Cranial turned to Lisa. "I should be ready for the first subject in twenty minutes, half an hour at the outside."
Lisa frowned. "Huh. I thought you took something like four hours just to get ready."
"Hardly." Cranial snorted with dry amusement. "That's how long it generally takes me to be done and gone. I don't like travel jobs. That's why—"
"—you charge extra. Got it." Lisa nodded. "Okay, is there anything else you need? A snack? Water?"
"No. I brought my own. I've got it from here, thanks." Cranial gave her another nod, then turned and headed back to where the flame-costumed man was positioning the heavy cart next to the chair.
Lisa sighed, then clenched her fists tightly to try to get over the jitters. So much could still go wrong, but at least Cranial seemed to know what she was doing.
She'd better. This is our best, last hope to avoid Amypocalypse.
<><>
Panacea
"Aisha and Taylor are back! Go and let them in, okay?"
Amy had nearly told Lisa to go fuck herself right then and there, but decided against it. The once-blonde-now-redhead was working her ass off to help Vicky, so they were on the same side for the moment. Still, the anger had surged when Lisa had silently suggested that she fuck up some other people's brains just to make life easier for New Wave after the fact. She didn't give two flying fucks about New Wave. It was Vicky she cared about: first, last and always.
Muttering under her breath, she stomped along the passageway to the door barring Taylor and Aisha from entering, and slapped the open button. It slid aside, and the pair came in; Taylor walking sedately, and Aisha almost dancing with suppressed energy. And then, a dozen birds flew through the closing doors, and perched on Taylor's arms and shoulders when she stopped walking.
Amy frowned. Not at the birds; that was Taylor's thing, these days. But both the newcomers were carrying tightly packed shopping bags, and Amy was almost certain Lisa hadn't sent them out to buy stuff. "Okay, what's this about?" she asked.
"Dealing with a potential problem," Taylor explained. "While we were out and about, making sure the PRT didn't spot Sarah and Eric picking up the partygoers, Aisha had a brainwave."
"Because I'm a fuckin' genius," Aisha boasted proudly. "Sure, we got all these people providin' their memory stuff for the Vickster to get her brainmeats back in order, but what happens when they all go back to school an' stuff, talkin' about how they all got kidnapped an' made to do this stuff? It'd blow up hotter'n Behemoth's asshole after a handful of Carolina Reapers."
Amy nodded. "Lisa was talking about that." She grimaced. "Wanted me to wipe their minds, after."
"Ah, no, fuck that shit." Aisha shook her head vigorously. "After what's already happened? Stupidest idea ever, an' I know bad decisions. I make 'em all the damn time."
"Thank you," Amy said, feeling somewhat mollified. "So, what's your solution?"
"One second," Taylor said, gesturing down the passageway with a nod of her head. "Lisa's on the way. Don't want to have to explain all this twice."
<><>
Tattletale
Hustling along the passageway, Lisa registered the shopping bags, but decided to temporarily ignore them. "It's about time. Where've you two been? Sarah and Eric will be back at any time, and we're going to have our hands full after that, keeping Vicky's friends quiet."
Aisha shook her head, beaming all over her face. "Nope. We got all that sorted. Figured you mighta maybe forgot about afterward, so we did a couple of detours along the way."
"Detours?" Lisa wanted to use her power to demystify what Aisha was saying, but she was edging too close to a Thinker headache as it was. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Lisa." Taylor's voice was calm, even as they walked rapidly back toward the main open area of the base. "Chill. Aisha's actually got it figured out. And Sarah and Eric are taking the slow way back, so we've got time to get set up."
"Get set up?" Lisa stared at her, then at the bags, as Taylor lifted one by way of illustration. "Get what set up? What are those, anyway? Why did you waste time going shopping?"
It was clear Aisha was enjoying herself far too much. "So, got a question for you. Suppose there's a bunch of kids and adults who've told they're coming to a party, but in actual fact they've been kidnapped to provide memories so a superhero can get her life back together. What's the best way to make sure they don't start gossiping to everyone all around 'em about it, afterward?"
Amy, who had been slouching along with the rest of them, took the bait before Lisa could. "Okay, how?"
"Well, duh." Aisha gave her a grin about three degrees more smug than Lisa had ever seen in the mirror. "We tell 'em that's exactly what we're doing … but we present it as the party theme."
Lisa blinked as those seven words changed the whole scenario. "Holy shit," she breathed. "Aisha, you're a fucking genius. They'll play along because they think it's just part of the theme."
"Exactly." Taylor hefted one of her bags. "So, can we find a place to get all this set up? I swear, my arms are three inches longer."
Lisa nodded. "Sure. Uh … where'd you get all the party stuff from, anyway?" The bags looked very full.
"Here an' there," Aisha said with a sly grin. "It's amazing what places you'll find open at this time of night."
"Wait," Amy said. "How'd you pay for it all? Please tell me you didn't shoplift all that stuff." Her tone indicated that she would find it highly amusing if such was the case.
"Some of it, yeah," Aisha admitted easily. "The rest of it? We maxed out Lisa's credit card."
"My credit—" Lisa made a grab for her pocket. Her wallet wasn't there. "What the fuck? When did you take that?"
"On the way out the door." Aisha grinned impudently. "Had a notion I might need it."
"Focus!" Taylor snapped, raising her voice. "Party. Setup. Now."
"Right, right." Lisa gave Aisha a glower that promised this wasn't over yet. "This way."
"Woo!" Aisha whooped. "Par-tay in the hizzouse!"
Lisa facepalmed. "Aisha, I will forgive you for the credit card if you never, ever say that again."
As they moved off, Amy fell in alongside Taylor. "Okay, so you've got that problem sorted. We've got a bigger one, though." She raised her voice slightly. "Lisa, what'd Cranial say about Carol?"
"That it would be a whole lot easier if she wasn't asleep." Lisa took one of Aisha's bags from her and started looking through it. "Shit, did you just grab everything on the shelf and shove it in here?"
"Pretty much," Aisha confirmed proudly.
"So yeah," Amy said to Taylor. "Can you or the resident genius there figure out how to get Carol processed through without making the party totally weird?"
Taylor paused for a moment. "Depends. Can you make a very specific bug for me?"
They spoke some more, but Lisa tuned them out. If they were working on a solution, that was good enough for her. Right now, she had a party to set up.
<><>
Lady Photon
Ten Minutes Later
Sarah and Eric swooped down to where Aisha had told them to go. "And here we are, folks. On the first step of your superhero/supervillain party experience. Are we ready to venture into the unknown?"
The girls and their parents looked around a little dubiously, for which she didn't blame them. This was literally a construction site, with an open trapdoor in the ground providing the sole entrance. Bethany's mother Constance raised her hand. "Are we supposed to be—"
"Heyyyy!" At that moment, Aisha popped her head out of the open trapdoor, shining a flashlight up under her face to throw most of it into eerie shadow. "Whoa, hey, it's the heroes! Get on down here, so we can thwart the dastardly plans of the eeeeevil supervillain Mind-Melter, right under his ugly-ass nose!"
Sarah wasn't sure whether it was her bouncy presentation or the utter campiness of what she was saying, but the girls all crowded toward the entrance. One by one, they climbed down into the dimly lit passageway, Sarah following behind the last one. When she got to the bottom, Vicky's friends were clustered around Aisha, who was handing out domino masks.
"Gotta have your masks, folks. Heroes gotta wear masks, so the villains can't learn who they are." She briefly shone the flashlight in her own face, to show the purple-glitter mask she was wearing. "Come on, mask up, and let's get this par-tay started!"
With all the masks secured in place, they proceeded along the tunnel, with Aisha cheerfully reciting a total line of bullshit about the faux 'Mind-Melter' and his 'reign of terror' over the city. Sarah was ninety-nine percent sure the girl was just making it up off the top of her head, but she was almost as fascinated as the others. Aisha, she decided, had a distinct future as a con artist if she were so inclined.
When they reached the other end, the way was barred by a tall figure, crawling with bugs and speaking in an eerie buzzing monotone. Sarah recognised it as Taylor, but only because she'd met the girl before. In full light, the creepiness factor would've been considerable; where they were, the dim light only allowed for flashes of reflection off of a million crawling carapaces, enhancing it considerably.
"Stop where you are," buzzed the monstrosity before them, holding out a hand dripping with bugs. "I am the Hive Queen Swarmina! Only those loyal to my master, Mind-Melter, may pass! Are you loyal?"
"Of course we're loyal!" Aisha stated boldly. "No heroes here. We're all loyal minions of Mind-Melter, aren't we, guys?" At the same time, she nodded her head in an exaggerated motion.
It only took them a second or so to catch on, then a chorus of, "Yes", "Sure", "Totally", came back from the girls. Sarah was impressed; with each time she got them to do what she said, Aisha was drawing them deeper into the roleplay.
"Very well. You may enter the domain of Mind-Melter." 'Swarmina' stood aside and hit a control, opening a sliding door and allowing them to enter the base proper. More than one shied away from Taylor, who merely stood there and buzzed at them.
"Whoa …" murmured Eric from beside Sarah as they stepped through in their turn. "They've been busy."
His comment was entirely justified. Streamers were strung up everywhere, along with cape-themed festive banners. Hanging from the ceiling was what Sarah tentatively identified as an inflatable disco ball, throwing glittery lights back all over the massive interior space. Tables and chairs had been dragged in from who knew where, with finger foods and bottles of pop set up next to stacks of paper cups and plates.
"Okay then, gather around," said Aisha in a stage whisper as music started playing across the PA system. "This is the deal. Mind-Melter has captured Glory Girl, and is planning to make her into a mindless zombie with his Mind-Melter chair down there." Stepping over to the rail, she pointed down toward where Cranial (Sarah had never met her, but the woman in the lab coat couldn't be anyone else) was setting up her equipment.
"Well, why don't we just destroy the chair then?" asked one of the girls in a smug I've-thought-of-a-solution-you-haven't tone. Sarah disliked her already.
"Because Mind-Melter has a guard," Aisha said, pointing out a guy wearing a flame-themed costume and hefting a bulky-looking rifle. "And we don't want to blow our cover. So, we're going to do something a ton more devious. While Swarmina's watching us—" she pointed to where Taylor had entered through the sliding door, "—we can't do anything, but when she leaves the room, one of you guys goes down there and tells Mind-Melter's minion that you're here to test the chair. While you're in the chair, you concentrate on all your best wishes for Glory Girl. This means that once you've all put your best wishes in there and she gets placed in the chair, instead of being zombified, she'll be made strong enough to defeat Mind-Melter with all your strengths combined. Got it?"
Again, it was the most basic of Saturday morning cartoon plots, but already Sarah could see the girls nodding in agreement. Pretending to be heroes, thwarting a supervillain, and having a party at the same time … it was simple, easy and fun. Plus, of course, the base itself and the Tinkertech chair made for amazing props.
The girls gathered around the tables and got their glasses of pop, Constance sought Sarah out. "Is that … is that chair safe?" she asked quietly, swivelling her eyes sideways to where Cranial was causing lights to run up and down the frame of the chair. "I mean, it's not going to do anything really, is it?"
And that's why overly realistic props are a bad thing. Sarah sighed internally. "It won't do a thing to them. In fact, I'll be going down there myself in about thirty seconds, just to show the kids how it's done." She turned and caught Taylor's eye as the bug-covered girl drifted through the crowd, then gave her a slight nod.
Returning the gesture, Taylor turned and headed out through another doorway. Accordingly, the music changed from the latest teen hit to an old classic; the Mission Impossible theme. Feeling like an idiot but determined to make this work, Sarah mimed sneaking onto the stairway down, pausing at the landing to peer around with exaggerated caution. When she got to the bottom, she darted across the open floor, pulled an entirely unnecessary shoulder-roll (aided considerably by her flight) to applause from those watching above, and arrived at Cranial's chair.
"I am here to test the chair!" she announced, loudly enough for all to hear.
To her credit, Cranial didn't burst out laughing. "Sure," she agreed, with the most wooden acting Sarah had ever seen. "You can 'test' the chair. Go ahead and sit down."
Sarah took her seat, not without a little trepidation. The helmet slid down over her head, and the opaque visor dropped into place. "Should I concentrate on Glory Girl?" she asked quietly.
"No," Cranial said, much more naturally. "Just let your mind drift. I'll take care of the rest."
Let my mind drift, hah. I'd love to see you do that right now. Sarah's brain was darting in a dozen different directions at once, but she took a deep breath and forced calm on herself. Victoria needs me right now, more than ever. I have to do this for her.
And then the visor slid up and Cranial lifted the helmet away. "Okay, done."
"Wait … that's it?" Sarah had expected to be there for minutes on end, not thirty seconds at most.
"Well, yeah. It's a simple scan-and-copy. It's not like I was stitching anything in there." Cranial's tone was matter-of-fact. "You can get up now."
"Right. Uh, thanks." Sarah got up from the chair to more applause from the people lining the rail above.
"Don't thank me, hon. Thank Tattletale. She's the one bankrolling this job."
When this is over, I'm giving Lisa the biggest hug. Sarah made her way back up to the balcony, arriving at the top of the stairs just in time for the triumphant flourish in the music. She nodded to Constance. "And that's how easy it is."
"Whoa ..." That was Bethany, crowding up alongside her mom. "Can I go next? Mom, can I?"
Constance glanced at Sarah, who gave her a reassuring nod. "I suppose you can," she allowed, and Sarah let out a tiny sigh of relief. They could probably get by even if one or two of Vicky's friends refused to donate memories (not that they knew exactly what the chair was about) but the more, the better.
Once Cranial was ready for her next subject, she turned and looked up towards the ongoing party. Again, Taylor (in her guise as 'Swarmina') nonchalantly wandered out of the area, and the music changed to another action-charged piece. Sarah gave Bethany a tiny nudge. "Go," she whispered.
With everyone watching, the teen crept down the stairs and scuttled across to where Cranial waited. Sarah watched curiously, interested in what the process looked like from the outside. Cranial didn't disappoint; lights rippled up and down the frame of the chair, and over the surface of the helmet. But the process seemed even shorter than it had with her. Maybe ten seconds passed before Cranial was raising the visor and ushering Bethany out of the chair.
More spontaneous applause arose as Bethany hurried back across and climbed the stairs to rejoin her peers. They crowded around her, asking what it had been like. Sarah wasn't close enough to hear the answer, and she turned away to see how everything else was going.
Aisha had vanished, most likely to relieve Neil on taking-care-of-Vicky duty, so everything was running smoothly on that front as well. Now, all we need is a solution to the Carol problem …
<><>
Taylor
Okay, let's see how this goes.
It was weird pretending to pretend to be a villainous minion. Walking slowly through the crowd, covered in bugs, I watched the partygoers edge away from me but smile at the same time; they were miming fear, but knew I wasn't a real villain. However, with the three-sixty-degree awareness the bugs gave me, I could move around without actually looking where I was going.
This was good, because my main attention was on two of the three other bugs that had been perching on a shelf in the infirmary since Amy created them. At my command, they took wing and buzzed over toward where Brandish lay asleep on the bed. Landing side by side on her bare arm, they arched their backs and extruded two long sharp stingers. When the first one plunged its stinger into a vein, Brandish barely twitched. I sent that bug back to the shelf once it was done, then told the second one to inject its payload as well.
After that, I made it rejoin its friends and they all sat there watching Brandish. Their eyesight was terrible, but at least I could make out basic shape and light. On the bed, Carol Dallon stirred; I felt the ghost of her nervous system as she woke up. Her eyes inched open, but she flopped onto her back and didn't move. Staring at the ceiling, blinking every now and again, she wasn't asleep but neither was she exactly awake, courtesy of the strong hypnotic injected by the first bug.
It was never easy for me to affect people, but I could … barely. If they had any strong impulses, they could easily override my commands. It usually took Regent's natural indolence or someone just not caring for me to make them do what I want.
But in the semi-waking state Carol Dallon was in, she was barely experiencing the world, and cared even less. I could use my tenuous hold on her nervous system to sit her up and swing her legs over the side of the bed. It would've been better if she'd been in costume, but I could only work with what I had.
As 'Swarmina' (I suspected I was never going to live that name down) I deliberately turned my back on Cranial and the Tinkertech chair. I wasn't sure how people would react to seeing Carol Dallon in civilian clothing, but Amy was right. Her memories of Vicky were central to the whole situation.
<><>
Laserdream
Crystal knew Taylor would walk 'offstage' and use a bug to signal Lisa to change the music once Cranial was ready for another subject. Cranial was indeed ready, but 'Swarmina' didn't seem about to make herself scarce, and the music never changed. However, someone was crossing the floor, down below.
When Crystal recognised who it was, she blinked twice before accepting what her eyes were telling her. Holy shit, it's Aunt Carol. Taylor and Amy pulled it off!
She wasn't overly thrilled about having Taylor puppet her aunt, but considering the alternatives, this was what her father usually called 'the least worst option'. "Shhh," she said theatrically. "Brandish has infiltrated the base! Mind-Melter can't possibly win now!"
The crowd fell silent and everyone pushed up to the rail. 'Swarmina' resolutely kept looking in the other direction as Crystal's aunt reached Cranial and spoke the same phrase. She was seated in the chair, and the process began. Crystal found herself digging her nails into her palm. Please, please, please let this work.
It took nearly a minute and a half, and Crystal got the impression some people were holding their breaths, before Cranial raised the visor and removed the helmet. And then, when Aunt Carol got up off the chair, she stumbled. Crystal tried not to gasp out loud.
As Aunt Carol tried to head back the way she'd come, she stumbled again, and shook her head. Crystal had a bad feeling about what that meant. Oh, shit. She's coming out of it.
"Hey, Swarmina!" shouted Eric, drawing all eyes. "Were you hatched from a cocoon, or are you so ugly that bugs just love you?"
"That is not a funny joke," Taylor responded with the monotone buzz. "You are not a nice boy."
As everyone laughed, Crystal vaulted over the rail and flew down to where her aunt was leaning against the wall. Her eyes focused, and there was real intent in them. "Where am I?" hissed Aunt Carol. "What's going on here? Who are these people?"
"It's all good," Crystal said soothingly. "Here, let me—"
"No!" Carol pulled away from her. "I'm staying right here, and I want answers."
Crystal acted on instinct; throwing a bubble around Carol, she took off flying at her best speed. With any luck, Eric's banter with Taylor had gotten everyone's attention, and nobody would think this was too unusual. On the other hand, she'd certainly gotten Aunt Carol's attention.
"Hey!" her aunt shouted, her voice thankfully muffled by the force field. "Let me out of this! Put me down right this moment, young lady!"
"Not until you listen," insisted Crystal. "There's stuff you don't know—"
Just in time, she saw the glowing blade ignite inside the force field bubble and lash out toward her. It could cut through most materials; Eric's field was strong enough to defend against it, but hers wasn't. Stopping on the spot, she let Carol out of the field, then backed up. They were only a short distance from the infirmary …
"Start talking." There was something in Carol's eyes that wasn't entirely sane. "Are you my niece, or just someone who looks like her? Where is my daughter?" The blade crackled softly. Crystal smelled ozone.
"Vicky's going to be just fine—"
Carol stepped closer. "Going to be?" Then she stopped; eyes widening, she reached back over her shoulder. "What have you done?"
"Aunt Carol—" Crystal watched the glowing blade as it waved back and forth across the corridor. With her other hand, Carol scrabbled at her back. Then finally what she hoped was the third bug's knockout dose took hold, and Carol sank to one knee. Her eyes were still blazing, even as her body failed her, and she tried to lash out with the blade. Fortunately, it only travelled about six inches toward Crystal before it winked out and Carol fell on her face.
Crystal breathed heavily, leaning on her knees and hoping she wasn't about to throw up, then looked at the bug that took flight from Carol's back, heading toward the infirmary. Thank fuck Taylor was on the ball. Mom is never gonna believe this.
Calling up her force field again, she scooped her aunt up and headed toward the infirmary. With any luck they'd be done and dusted, and Vicky would be mentally whole, before Carol woke up again.
Let's hope that's the last of the drama. I can't deal with any more of this shit.
<><>
Circus
The metal around the lock glowed red-hot as she discarded the last of the road flares. She had to admit; the ventilation system in this cell was pretty damn good for something that had ducts measuring about two inches square. Flexible she was, but not that damn flexible.
Now all she had to do was wait until the door cooled down enough, and she'd have the lock picked. And then …
Tattletale, you bitch. I'm coming for you.
End of Part Thirteen
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Part Fourteen: Penultimate
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One Bad Day
Part Fourteen: Penultimate
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Cranial
Lil still wasn't one hundred percent sure what was going on here. But then again, she wasn't being paid to worry about that part. Pyrotechnical was standing by to play rear-guard if events went severely tits-up; she could open a doorway into a Dodge space and get everything inside in thirty seconds if she had to, but it would be a very long thirty seconds. However, everything seemed to be running smoothly.
The only hiccup—Brandish going off-script, then being whisked out of sight by Laserdream—had had her tensing and reaching for the remote. Fortunately, nothing had come of it, and she'd allowed herself to relax a little and get back to doing she was being paid for. This is why I hate the weird jobs.
As each memory set came in, it wasn't hard to strip out everything that didn't pertain to Glory Girl, then set it to meshing with what she already had. Lady Photon's and Brandish's had formed the core of this shared memory experience early on. The other kids were adding superficial amounts and filling in a few gaps here and there, but only the New Wavers and one other (she didn't know who the good-looking blond boy was, and didn't care to speculate) added a significant amount.
That didn't mean it was a perfect engram; there were always times when someone was on their own, and determining someone's state of mind or thought processes from what they were doing or saying was an inexact science. However, everyone had holes in their memories from simply forgetting what they'd done on a certain day, and emotions rarely translated into long-term storage unless they were particularly vivid, so what she had would be workable, especially if Glory Girl's memory still had fragments left to attach to.
(She still didn't know exactly what had happened to Glory Girl, and it wasn't something she intended to pry into.)
There were, of course, the two stipulations that Tattletale had insisted on from the beginning. Neither one was a deal-breaker, but the second one was going to be just a tad finicky. Don't let anyone be in love with anyone else had raised her eyebrows, and given her another hint as to what was going on. Though she suspected she'd never get the full picture.
She checked the screen and verified that the latest read (Manpower's, and was she glad the chair was built to take someone his size) had integrated with the rest. Raising her eyes, she gave Tattletale a nod. This in turn triggered a change in the music, and the second-last of the kids (if her count was correct) came 'sneaking' down the stairs.
"I-I'm here to test the chair!" the girl declared. She was wearing a bright red domino mask and looked nervous as hell. Not that Lil blamed her; stage props were one thing, but actual Tinker tech had a certain look and feel to it, especially close up.
"Sure, go ahead," she responded, readying the 'Hair Dryer'. "Just sit right here. It won't hurt a bit."
Obediently, the girl sat down, and Lil lowered the helmet over her head. The opaque visor—it helped to let the mind wander if there was no visual input—slid into place, and the girl let out a startled cry. "I can't see anything!"
Didn't she see the same thing happen with everyone else? "That's how it's supposed to be," Lil said quietly. "Just relax and let your mind wander."
"You're-you're not going to hypnotise me and make me cluck like a chicken, are you?"
"No," Lil said shortly. She was tempted to add, That's my other brain transfer machine, but decided to leave well enough alone. "Relax. Let your mind wander."
Finally, the girl calmed down enough to get a good read from her—seven seconds, not bad—and Lil raised the visor and lifted the helmet off. It took the girl a few seconds to react. "It's done? I can go?"
"It's done," Lil assured her. "You can go back up and join your friends now."
"Oh, good." The kid got up and scuttled back across the floor, to applause from the watchers.
One to go, then we can really get this show on the road. Lil went through the motions to strip out the extraneous information, then overlaid it onto the rest. As she'd expected, ninety-five percent of it integrated with pre-existing memories, with just a few new viewpoints. The rest slipped into place without any problems on the ever-growing amalgam, and she looked up to Tattletale.
When the music changed this time, it was Panacea who came out of a side corridor; wearing street clothes, certainly, but there was no mistaking her for anyone else. Also, there was no mistaking the stress she was under. The girl had circles under her eyes that belonged to someone thirty years older and going through mid-life crisis.
She didn't even bother pretending to sneak, even as those watching from above appeared to hold their breaths. Unlike Brandish, there was no uncertainty; Panacea was driven and determined. Moving with purpose, she seated herself on the chair and allowed the helmet to be lowered over her head.
"Please tell me you can fix all this," she mumbled as the visor went down.
"Do my best, hon. That's why you called in the experts. Now, try to relax and let your mind wander. This might take a little while."
"Okay." But from the white-knuckled grip Panacea had on the chair arms, relaxing was the last thing she intended to do.
Lil sighed and started the read. She was here to do a job. Let's get it done and dusted.
Tattletale
"Is it just me, or is Panacea taking longer than everyone else?" asked Bethany. She wasn't wrong; it had been more than a minute, and Amy was still under the helmet.
"She's making extra sure that Glory Girl gets all the encouragement she needs," Lisa responded automatically. "When Glory Girl gets under there, she'll be reminded of all the good times they've spent together." In a way, it wasn't even a lie. Vicky was going to be reminded of things, only not in the way Bethany thought.
I'll be a whole lot happier once this whole dog and pony show is over. The party guests couldn't simply be shooed out once they'd donated their memories. If they weren't allowed to stay and celebrate their 'victory' with the re-memoried Glory Girl, far too many questions would be asked. Still, everything seemed to be going relatively smoothly. So why am I on edge? What am I missing?
Crystal eased through the guests and tapped her on the shoulder. One look at the New Wave girl's face sent Lisa's paranoia into orbit. Shit. Shit. Fuck.
'What?' she mouthed silently.
'Office,' Crystal mimed back. That meant Coil's office, which Lisa had appropriated as the ad hoc control room for the whole complex. Whatever was going on, she'd find out about it there.
It only took her about thirty seconds to get there while moving casually enough not to draw notice, but it felt like thirty years. Whatever it is, please God let it be fixable.
When she got there, Taylor was sitting at Coil's desk, staring intently at one of the screens. How she'd gotten into the office without being noted by the guests was simple; when the bugs that were her Swarmina guise went away, she was just another teenage girl in a domino mask. However, right now, her fists were clenched so tightly that her knuckles were white in the glow of the screens.
"Circus got out," Taylor said bluntly, without looking up. "I've been trying to tag her with bugs, but she's a lot more aware of her environment right now. And she keeps doing her fire-breath thing with a lighter. I've lost three swarms, so far."
"Shit." Lisa eyed the screen, and noticed that a lot of the sub-screens were blank. "Has she been knocking out the cameras, too?"
"Yeah." Taylor's jaw was tight. "I'm pretty sure we can't catch her unawares like we did the first time. Should we maybe open the outer doors and let her go?"
"No." Lisa said the word before her brain had properly processed the question. "She won't go. She's after revenge. Specifically, on me. I'm the one she was hunting. She believes she's owed."
"And we can't just pay her?" Taylor already knew the answer to that one, but Lisa knew she had to ask it anyway.
"Nope. Between shelling out for Vicky's brain fix and this party, I'm in hock up to the eyebrows. I figure I could maybe afford a soda right now, if you were willing to spot me a quarter." It wasn't quite that bad, but Lisa knew damn well Circus wouldn't accept anything less than seventy-five percent of what she figured she was owed, and there was nothing like that in the kitty.
"So, what do we do? Send New Wave after her?" Taylor sounded hopeful at that idea.
"Yeah, that's what I'm thinking." Lisa ran her hands through her hair. "I've got Sarah watching Brandish, so I'm thinking Eric and Neil. Let Dean and Crystal run interference in the party while they're all watching Panacea in the chair."
"Oh, she just finished," Taylor reported. "Cranial's doing a lot of work right now, but she doesn't look too worried. At least, not as far as I can tell."
"She's the one thing that's got to go right," Lisa agreed.
"Yeah." Taylor gnawed on a thumbnail for a second. "What about Vicky? Who's watching her?"
"Aisha." Lisa rolled her eyes. "She might be as irritating as hell, but she's really stepping up."
"No argument here. I'll stay here and let you know if Circus shows up on camera again."
"Got it." Lisa slipped out of the office. Goddamn it. It was all going so smoothly, too.
Cranial
With the Panacea read complete and integrated with the gestalt as a whole, the finicky part of the job began. Each memory of Glory Girl seen from the outside now had to be inverted, so that it could be experienced from the inside. This meant the visuals had to be switched around, and the faces of those with her placed in the appropriate locations within the emerging memory patch.
It wasn't always possible to do this, but it wasn't a real problem. Where she didn't have an up-to-date face, she slotted one in from earlier or later, whichever worked better. And if Glory Girl ended up thinking Bethany had acquired that nice blouse a month earlier than she really did, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Memory played tricks like that sometimes, even when one's brain hadn't gone through a hard reset.
Emotions were trickier, but she had a good baseline for that as well. Glory Girl loved her mother and mourned her father, held slightly more distant familial views of her aunt and uncle and cousins, enjoyed the company of her friends, and had a very close relationship with someone who looked remarkably like the young man from upstairs. That was all well and good, and she was able to program those emotions in with relative ease.
Panacea … was more problematic. Going through her memories clued Lil in on what had started this whole debacle. She was a tangled mass of neuroses which included abandonment issues, unconscious hatred for her foster mother—wait, foster mother?
Okay, so Panacea had been adopted, but how? Lil ran back through the recorded memory. When she came to the relevant part, she blinked hard. Holy fuck, New Wave adopted Marquis' kid? How is that not common knowledge?
Deep breaths, deep breaths. Not my problem. Okay, she doesn't even know that she hates Brandish, but she does. She's also strongly in love with Glory Girl, who from her interactions has no idea of this. Had no idea. This was what Tattletale had been talking about, it had to be. After the mindwipe, the entire rudimentary personality Glory Girl had been left with was based around loving Panacea.
Okay, Glory Girl will see Panacea strictly as her sister, and nothing else.
Except that if I leave the memory of the mindwipe intact, which Tattletale says Panacea wants, Glory Girl is likely to go after Panacea and try to murder her.
Is Panacea trying to commit suicide by cape? Because pissing off Glory Girl seems to be a remarkably efficient way to do it, if the nearly-dead gangsters are any indication.
Did I mention that I hate weird jobs? I hate weird jobs.
But her price had been agreed to and the money was there, so it was time to woman up and get it done.
Shielder
The radio earpiece crackled slightly, then Taylor's voice came through. "Ready to open door 12-A. Be careful; I don't have cameras on the other side of it."
"Great," muttered Eric. A moment's concentration created a force-field bubble next to the sliding door, so that if Circus was indeed waiting in ambush on the other side, nothing would get through. "Okay, open it up."
"That force field will stop a thrown knife, right?" asked Tattletale, standing next to him in the bubble. "Circus is really good with those."
"I can tank Aunt Carol's energy blades, so yeah. It'll stop a thrown knife." Eric cleared his throat, not wanting to sound too boastful. "How laser-proof is Circus?"
"She's not." The door began to slide open. Tattletale peered through, then let out a slight huff; whether of relief or disappointment, Eric wasn't sure. "But she's insanely good at dodging, and she has all sorts of crazy things in her personal pocket dimension."
There was nobody on the other side. Eric let the bubble bulge through, then he and Tattletale entered the next section. Here and there he could see blackened spots up on the ceiling where he suspected security cameras had been mounted. "She's been busy," he observed. "How'd she manage that?"
"Minor pyrokinetic," Lisa reminded him. "All she needs is a source of flame, like a Zippo or a road flare, and she can make it into a burst of fire. Also, if she's holding a knife, assume she can stab you from any angle. She can bounce those things."
"Knives, I can handle," Manpower asserted. "Fire breath isn't so much fun."
"Transmitted heat?" asked Tattletale, though her tone suggested she knew the answer already.
"Transmitted heat," he confirmed. "Fire can't touch me directly, but it's still hot when it's half an inch away from my skin."
The door slid shut behind them and the keypad turned red again. They moved on through the base, remaining within Eric's bubble, although this slowed them down more than a little. More and more scorched security cameras showed up, though some were untouched. Eric waved at those before they moved on again.
Each room they encountered, they opened and checked within, to ensure Circus wasn't lurking there. On the third such room, there was nobody inside, but the light switch didn't work. Still, a quick sweep of an attenuated laser beam around the interior of the room showed it was empty of all but cleaning supplies.
They were about to move along when Tattletale said, "Wait, go back."
"Why?" asked Eric. "Did you see something?"
"That's the only room we've seen where the light wasn't working," she said. "There's something she doesn't want us to see in that room."
Neil shrugged. "Sometimes lights just fail." But he didn't object when they went back anyway.
This time, Lisa studied the entire room carefully, including the light fitting. It had been scorched, in the same manner as the security cameras. Turning, she pointed at the air vent cover. "That's been removed and replaced. It's what she didn't want us to see. She's in the air ducts."
Neil studied the air duct cover carefully. It wasn't much more than a foot across. "Are you sure? That's not a metal air duct, that's concrete. If anyone gets stuck, there's no rescue coming."
"I bet I could fit down it," Eric claimed. Not that he wanted to, but he totally figured he could.
"Well, you're not going to find out." Neil's tone was very much 'Dad has spoken'. "Do we have a map of the air ducts?"
Tattletale scratched the back of her neck. "Almost certainly, somewhere on the computer system. I'll have to look for it."
Eric had to know. "Okay, so if this Coil guy was as paranoid as you keep telling us, why would he have air ducts in his base that a person can crawl through?"
"It was because he was so paranoid," Tattletale explained. "He always hired big, muscular guys. Out of everyone in his crew, he was the only one skinny enough to use them to get around."
"Huh." Eric hoped he would never get that paranoid. It sounded like a miserable way to live.
"Damn right." Tattletale keyed her radio. "Problem. She's gotten into the air ducts. We need to figure out where she is, and how to flush her out. Coming back in."
"Well, shit. Ready to open 12-A on your signal."
Circus
There were only a few good things about this decision.
First, she didn't have to worry about dragging her gear along, because it was all inside her hammerspace. If she needed her Zippo to see where she was going, she could get it out with minimum fuss.
Second, whoever had set up these air ducts had ensured that there were no impossibly tight turns or even sharp edges inside. Also, for some unknown reason, there was the occasional metal plate with letters or numbers etched into it. If I knew more about the layout of this base, I might actually be able to make use of that.
Third, of course, was the fact that it was cast out of concrete, which didn't have the propensity of metal air ducting of being horribly noisy to move through and likely to collapse under the weight of a medium-sized rat.
Neither did it possess the usual accoutrements of the average supervillain base air ducts, as noted in popular fiction, such as electrified mesh or razor-edged high-speed fans. All of which led her to wonder if Coil had intended for these air ducts to be traversable. And if so, by whom?
Wait. This is Coil we're talking about. This is a guy who probably built an escape tunnel on his escape tunnel. Of course he set it up so he could vanish into the air ducts.
Great. Mystery solved. Now, if only I knew where I was, and how to get to Tattletale.
Tattletale
As soon as Lisa got back to where the party was going on, Crystal homed in on her like a guided missile. Lisa took one look at her expression, then stepped in close. "What's happened? Have you found Circus?"
"No." Crystal took a deep breath. "Cranial's been trying to get my attention, but I have no idea what she wants, and I don't want to go down there."
"Shit." With the way things were going, Lisa flashed to the worst possible interpretation. The memory recordings went wrong. She needs to do them all over again. Or she can't do it at all. Jesus, how am I going to explain this to Amy?
With this running through her head, she moved over to the rail and gestured to get the guard's attention. He turned and said something to Cranial, who seemed to brighten up under her concealing helmet. Her next gesture was something Lisa's power was easily able to decipher.
Ready to roll. Bring on Glory Girl.
She nodded and gave Cranial a discreet thumb's up before keying her radio mic. "Tango to Alpha. We're good to go. I say again, we're good to go."
There was a pause, then an answer came through. "Yo, this is Most Esteemed Alpha. I'll be bringing my girl, the Vickster, through right now. Roger dodger, over and out, rubber duckie."
With a silent prayer of thanks that Aisha had no desire to join the military in any capacity—her discipline issues aside, just her butchering of radio etiquette would probably cause aneurysms in anyone trying to train her—Lisa made the 'all okay' gesture to Cranial. Turning, she headed back toward the office where Taylor was still manning the control centre.
If anyone had suggested to me a month ago that I'd find myself in command of my very own underground base, overseeing the memory reintegration of a superhero while trying to deal with a supervillain lurking in the air ducts … I would've probably asked what they were smoking.
But that was the way her life seemed to be going these days.
Taylor
"Anything?" asked Lisa, the moment she was inside the office and the door was closed behind her. "I thought there were barriers in the air ducts that stopped people from getting around."
Taylor shook her head and leaned back in the admittedly very comfortable chair that Coil had bequeathed to the office. Closing her eyes for a moment to rest them, she sighed in aggravation. "I thought so too, until I looked more closely. There's barriers between the base and the outside air, sure. The last thing Coil wanted was people sneaking in or out. Secure areas like the cells or the armoury have tiny air ducts, like four inches across. But through the main areas of the base? Just big enough to fit a skinny person."
"Like you, or Coil, or Circus, yeah." Lisa growled under her breath. "Even dead, that asshole's paranoia is coming back to bite us. Have you found a map yet?"
"Yeah, but I don't know if it's accurate." Taylor sat forward again and hit a few keys. A diagram of the base came up on the screen, with an overlay of lines connecting the various rooms. "This might be the actual version, or it might be the one Coil had made to fool people with, while the real one is hidden in an anonymous file somewhere."
"Goddamn it." Lisa leaned in close, studying it. She didn't want to waste a use of her power quite yet; as it was, with all the demands on her, she was hovering on the edge of a migraine. "It could be. Looks real enough. But he'd make sure even the fake one looked real."
"Okay, so we flush her out and map the air ducts at the same time." Taylor glanced up at the air vent in the office. She'd shoved a filing cabinet in front of it, to make it harder for anyone trying to push it out from inside. "I don't have any special-issue rats left, but maybe Amy can—"
"Nun-uh." Lisa shook her head. "Amy's not in a good headspace to make anything to order right now. She's likely to somehow make it into a fuel-air explosive, or a nerve gas dispenser. Something we absolutely do not want in this base right now, or ever."
"Right. So we go with what we've got." Taylor grimaced. "She's really good at spotting bugs, and frying them before they can KO her."
"Okay, rats it is." Lisa ran her hands through her hair, further disarranging it. "Once you locate her, do you think you can maybe keep her busy until we're done with Vicky, and the innocents are out of here?"
"Gonna have to, aren't I?" This was getting more complicated by the second.
"And don't attack her. The last thing we want is screaming coming from the ducts and scaring the guests."
Taylor groaned and rolled her eyes. "Yes, boss."
Lisa patted her on the shoulder. "Attagirl."
Aisha
"Okay, let's go, Vickster." Aisha took a deep breath. She'd built a great rapport with Vicky so far, but all she needed now was for her charge to decide that she wanted to play patty-cake instead of coming along quietly. "Time for a new game. You want to play a cool new game?"
"I like playing games," Vicky said brightly. "Games are fun. Will Amy be playing this game with us?"
"Amy's already playing the game." It was even true, for a given definition of 'true'. "It's your turn now. I think you'll win, don't you?"
Vicky looked hesitant. "I don't want to beat Amy and make her sad."
"Oh, no, no." Aisha thought fast. "You're on Amy's side. If you do really well, you'll both win."
Vicky perked up. "Then I'll play and win, and make Amy happy."
"That's my girl." Aisha gave her a hug. "Let's go wow them all."
Hand in hand, she led Vicky out into the lower area, where Cranial was prepping the chair for Vicky. Lisa had seen them coming, and the music changed to something with a dramatic beat, as befitted the climax of the show. The nominal guests of the party had all been downstairs and sat in the chair, and now it was time for the big payoff. The girls lined the rail and clapped as she came into view.
"Oh, look, it's my friends!" Vicky waved excitedly and levitated into the air. "I'll go and say hi to them."
"No, no, not yet!" Aisha gave her a gentle downward tug. "If—if you go up there, you forfeit the game and Amy loses!"
"Oh." Vicky pouted, but she came back down to earth. "That's a stupid game."
"It's the game we're playing. Now come over here. You see that chair?"
Vicky tilted her head. "It's a silly looking chair."
"Oh, yeah. It's a stupid looking chair, alright." Aisha didn't actually think so. As far as she was concerned, it belonged in some mad Tinker's basement somewhere … which wasn't too far removed from the current situation, to be honest. "But this is the game. You have to sit in it and let that lady put that helmet on your head, and close your eyes and sit still for as long as you can. If you sit longer than everyone else, you and Amy win the game. Okay?"
Vicky nodded enthusiastically. "Okay!"
"Excellent. Here, I'll just take your tiara off." Otherwise, it would definitely interfere with the helmet.
Vicky balked. "But I want to keep my tiara on. I'm Glory Girl. I always wear my tiara."
Lowering her voice, Aisha leaned in close to Vicky. "Do you want the other girls to beat you and Amy? Because they'll totally be mean to her about it."
"No, I don't want that." Reaching up, Vicky removed the tiara from her freshly brushed hair. "Can you take care of it for me, Most Esteemed Aisha?"
Aisha nodded and took it, trying not to let the tears show in her eyes. This was probably the last time she was ever going to see the simple, happy Vicky who liked to have her hair brushed and braided, and to play patty-cake. "I can totes do that for you, Vickster. Now, go and win that game for Amy." She couldn't say any more through the lump in her throat.
Beaming, Vicky strode up to the chair and seated herself. She closed her eyes and held perfectly still as the helmet was lowered over her head, and the visor dropped into place. Stepping away, Cranial leaned over her equipment and started pressing buttons and turning dials.
Aisha couldn't watch anymore. Turning away, she saw the row of girls avidly observing to see what happened next. Some nodded to her, in a 'we're in this together' sort of way. She gave them a weak thumb's up in return.
God, I hope this works.
Taylor
"God, I hope this works." Taylor watched as Eric used his force field to lift the filing cabinet away from where she'd shoved it up against the air vent. She had eight rats resting on her shoulders and arms—all she could gather at short notice—plus a small swarm of bugs.
"It better." Eric pulled the vent cover off—Taylor had already checked with her bugs to ensure that Circus wasn't lurking within knife-throwing range inside the duct—and set it aside. "Clear."
Putting her hand up on the edge of the air duct, Taylor made the rats run up her arm and vanish into the darkness. The bugs flew with them, scouting ahead. Each time the group hit an intersection, they split their numbers and kept exploring.
As Eric put the vent cover back on and shoved the cabinet back into place, Taylor sat down at the computer and called up the diagram she'd found. Lisa had already expressed a strong suspicion that what was on the computer didn't match reality, and Taylor tended to agree with her. Coil had been a paranoid sonovabitch to the end, and this was probably no exception.
Come on … where are you … where are you …
Cranial
"Son of a bitch," muttered Lil as she ran her preliminary scan to see what sort of substrate she'd be stitching the memory patch into. She'd done individual grab-and-repair jobs before, usually involving cases of amnesia due to head trauma. That was simplicity itself compared to what was going on here.
Only the barest tag-ends of some memories were left behind, and she could see the unmistakeable signs of where someone had overlaid a new personality, then taken it away again. Whoever had done it (given what she knew already, she suspected Panacea) hadn't bothered or known to remove the memories of having had that new personality graft, however briefly. Seriously. Fucking amateurs. At least she took it away before it did too much damage.
Using all the finesse of which she was capable, she set to work sanitising the area, scraping away the damage until everything was ready for the new patch. Leaving anything underneath where it could grow and fester was merely a recipe for disaster; weeks or months or years later, brand new mental problems could surface, undoing all the work she was performing now. And I really don't want to be responsible for a powerhouse like this going off the deep end.
Finally, it was ready. She'd identified the points in her constructed gestalt where the lone fragments of memory could attach to. Once it was in place, she'd set Glory Girl to living through her reconstructed life. Not at a one-to-one ratio, of course. Nobody had the time to wait through something like that. But just as someone within a dream could live through subjective years in mere seconds, she could speed up Glory Girl's experienced time, going barely slow enough to patch any holes that cropped up.
And—fingers crossed—once Glory Girl came out the far end, she would've reformed her original personality (or something very close to it) by way of her re-lived life experiences. Unfortunately, this was the tricky bit. If something utterly life-changing had happened to her away from all the recorded memories, it wouldn't happen this time around. And Lil couldn't throw in a correction for something she knew nothing about.
But she could only work with the material she'd been given. Tattletale knew that, which was why she'd been paid the majority of the money up front.
Carefully, step by step, Lil commenced the memory implant process.
Panacea
Lurking in the shadows of a corridor entrance, Amy clenched her fist and gnawed at her knuckles. "Please let it work," she whispered. "Please let it work."
She had no idea what she would do if it didn't. All of her efforts had gone into getting to this point. She knew she wouldn't have even gotten this far if it weren't for Lisa and Taylor and Aisha. As it was, disaster had threatened on half a dozen occasions, only to be averted by the slimmest of margins. Without them, Vicky would still be a brain-wiped doll, with no chance of ever getting her life back and no way forward.
And if it went wrong now, after all this effort, all this money, had gone into it … she clenched her fists even tighter. The single bright spot in all this was the chance that her mistake could be rectified, that Vicky could be restored. If that light of hope was to be extinguished, if the darkness tarnishing her soul was to take over everything … she didn't know if she would ever come out the other side.
"Hey." It was Lisa's voice, behind her. A light hand fell on her shoulder. "Hey, Amy. It's going to be alright. Vicky'll be the same old pain in the ass once this is over and done. You'll see. Cranial came with the highest of recommendations."
"But what if it isn't alright?" Amy asked, her voice harsh with self-recrimination. "There's no way she's ever dealt with shit as bad as what I did to Vicky. I tried to fix her, but all I did was make it worse, so I had to fix that, and what if I made it so bad even Cranial can't do anything because of my fuckups?"
"And what if you didn't?" Lisa's hand slid across Amy's shoulders. "What if what you did is basically what she fixes on a Tuesday? She deals in memories. It's what she does. Trust me, I looked into her pretty damn hard before I contacted her. And you've known Vicky since forever, right? Your memories, turned around, are gonna be what fixes her. You'll see. I mean, your mom, your aunt, your uncle, whatsisface …"
Amy snorted with amusement despite herself. She could see what Lisa was trying to do, but it was still working after a fashion. "Dean. His name is Dean. And he's her boyfriend. I'll never try to get in the way of that. Maybe I should leave altogether, go somewhere else."
Self-exile sounded better and better all the time, now that she came to think of it. Once Vicky was herself again (Aisha had referred to it exactly once as restoring a save game file, before Lisa had smacked her across the top of the head) then it would be better for all concerned if she cut ties and left them to have their happy life.
Because she knew damn well Vicky wouldn't want her around. She'd emphasised to Cranial that she didn't want any remnant of the love she'd foisted on Vicky to be left behind. Once Vicky was cured, and if she chose to spare Amy's life for the horrendous sin that had been perpetrated on her …
"Don't even go there," Lisa murmured. "If Cranial does her job right, and I know she will, Vicky will know exactly how desperately hard you've been trying to get her back up to speed. Not only is she not going to punch your head off your shoulders, but she's also not going to want to chase you away. I mean, all this wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for you."
"Damn right," retorted Amy. "I'm the one who fucked Vicky over in the first place. If I hadn't let my stupid selfish wants take over, we wouldn't be in this position."
"Not stupid and not selfish," Lisa countered. "I'm pretty well ace myself, but from my understanding what you want and need isn't exactly something you can pick and choose. Sure, you're gay. Big deal. If I were a guy, I'm pretty certain I'd be drooling over Vicky every chance I got. Because holy shit, does she have it going for her."
Lisa's deadpan delivery had Amy turning and giving her a suspicious stare. "Are you mocking me?"
"Not in the slightest." Lisa's expression never shifted. "Just saying, it takes all kinds. But as for you, I'm wondering if your mistake didn't come from another source. That is, it wasn't totally your fault."
Amy blinked. "I'm not sure I follow."
"Okay, let's see. When you've been making up the birds and rats and bugs for Taylor, has it made you feel better?"
This line of questioning didn't actually improve Amy's level of confusion. "Well, yeah, actually. It was like I was doing something right, to help Vicky."
"Mm-hmm." Lisa rapped on Amy's skull with her knuckles. "That's where your problem is, then. In there."
"So, me. I'm the problem." Amy stared at her defiantly. "That's what I've been saying all along."
"Nope. Your corona pollentia. Your gemma." Lisa raised an eyebrow. "Your powers, dumbass."
Amy gritted her teeth at Lisa's patronising tone. "I know what the corona pollentia and the gemma do. Probably better than you do. What about my powers?"
"Well, for starters, have you ever heard of capes who tried to hang up the mask but just couldn't help getting back into the game?" Lisa tilted her head. "No? I have. They want to retire, but their powers just … come out. And they get forced back into it. It's not a hugely common thing, but I've also heard of people trying to defend reckless power use by saying their powers just activated all by themselves. Usually a power that they're trying to never use, like ever."
"What are you trying to say?" Amy shook her head as she stared at Lisa. "You can't be saying what that sounds like … can you?"
"I don't know." Lisa shrugged, apparently attempting unconcern. "Funny thing with my power. If I use it too much, I get headaches. A really strenuous bout will have me laid up with a migraine for a day or more. Classic Thinker headache, yeah? But if I try to never use my power, if I repress it altogether or restrict what I use it for, it kicks in anyway, usually giving me information that will push me toward bad decisions. Almost like …" She trailed off, gesturing for Amy to finish the thought.
"Almost like it's punishing you for not using it?"
Lisa snorted. "Maybe. Or maybe it just wants to be used in new and interesting ways, and doesn't have a hassle with how interesting things get."
"Okay, yeah, your power's got issues. Understood." Amy shook her head. "But my power doesn't ever go wrong like …" She paused, a terrible realisation flooding through her. Go wrong like that. "Oh. Oh, shit."
"Mm-hmm." Lisa didn't say anything else, just stood there looking at her with a sympathetic expression on her face.
"No." Amy shook her head, trying to feel justified with the strength of the denial. "No, I've healed hundreds of people, flawlessly. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands?" She didn't know. Somewhere along the way, she'd lost count. "Sometimes I've wanted to screw something up, just so I could take a step back, but I never have."
"Yeah, you've healed people." Lisa tilted her head for emphasis. "All you ever do is heal people. You don't go out and create new and interesting plants, or animals. Building explosive birds was the most fun you'd had in forever, wasn't it? Because it let you use your power in a totally new way, and it rewarded you with a dopamine hit. And it's making you feel crappy about healing."
"It felt great," Amy agreed. "I didn't know why. My power … why? Healing people is a good thing to do."
"I have no idea," Lisa confessed. "When I ask my power about this sort of thing, it goes, 'what thing?'. But it's happening. If you know where to look, you can totally see people being manipulated by their powers, even in small ways. And if I had to guess … I'd say it wants variety."
"Well, shit." Amy slumped against the wall. "My power thinks I'm boring."
"Could be worse." Lisa grinned suddenly. "If your power thinks you're boring, what if all of Leet's accidents aren't because he's a shitty Tinker?"
Amy's eyes opened wide. The scrawnier half of Uber and Leet had a well-deserved reputation for Tinker tech that fell apart, malfunctioned in some pretty impressive ways, or just plain refused to work at exactly the wrong time. "If that's deliberate … what's it trying to do? Kill him?"
"Either that, or it's doing its best to get his attention before he accidentally kills himself." Lisa shrugged, very obviously discarding the topic. "So let's suppose you've been essentially feeding your power a diet of unsweetened tapioca for the last few years, and all it wants is some spice in its diet. And in a moment of weakness, it takes your unconscious desires and makes them real. You know why you couldn't fix it?"
The conclusion was obvious, especially given how Lisa had framed it. "My power didn't want me to. It wants me to go on and do more."
"Bingo." Lisa waved at the base around them. "And look at what you've done so far."
"So, why do I still feel like shit?" Even now, Amy could feel the miles-deep abyss calling to her, inviting her to submerge herself in the depths of angst once more.
Lisa waved out toward the open area, where Cranial was working on her gadgetry, with Vicky sitting in the chair. "What's happening out there?"
"They're fixing my mistake … oh. Oh, crap."
"Mm-hmm." Lisa nodded in Amy's direction. "Your power doesn't think it was a mistake. Its modification of Vicky is being reversed, as much as possible. We're changing things back to the way they were. No more abominations of biology." She laced her fingers in front of her. "Back to a steady diet of unsweetened tapioca."
"So what do I do?" asked Amy desperately. "How do I stop it doing this again? I can't just start modifying brains. That goes against everything I believe in."
Lisa shrugged. "Then don't. Do something else. Make glow-in-the-dark squirrels or airborne jellyfish. Pets to order, with as many legs, eyes and other appendages as your clients want. Hell, you could make an absolute killing as a transhumanist plastic surgeon. So long as it's not just plain vanilla healing anymore."
"I can't." The realisation hit Amy like a freight train. "Carol would—"
"Then leave New Wave." Lisa's tone was firm. "You were already considering it. Go ahead and just do it. No matter how this pans out, your relationship with them is never going to be the same again." She rapped Amy's forehead, right between her eyes. "Your happiness is more important."
"You mean it?" Amy looked searchingly at Lisa. "You're not just saying that?"
Lisa snorted. "I would lie to a great many people about a great many things, but right here and right now, I'm telling the unvarnished truth. Hell, you can move in here with me and Taylor and Aisha, if you want. It's not like we don't have the room."
It was a huge leap, but Amy felt she had no other choice in the matter. "Okay. So long as Vicky turns out okay, I think I'll take you up on that." As she said the words, she felt the burden on her begin to lift.
"Good to hear it." Lisa put her arm around Amy's shoulders. "So, there's this other little problem we've got …"
Circus
Coil, you sneaky bastard.
She'd nearly gone past it, feeling her way in the dark, but her elbow had brushed a panel that swung inward. Backing up slightly, she nudged it all the way open and flicked her Zippo to reveal a tiny cubby-hole. With a little contortion, she managed to wriggle inside, where a light switch allowed her to see what she'd stumbled upon.
Barely ten feet by ten, it was a bunker within a bunker; food, water, weapons, a camp bed, a chemical toilet. Plus, a screen that allowed her to tap into the security cameras.
She could see everything that was going on, and they had no idea where she was.
And best of all, as she flicked through, she could see one particular face, plain as day.
There you are.
End of Part Fourteen
Part Fourteen: Penultimate
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Cranial
Lil still wasn't one hundred percent sure what was going on here. But then again, she wasn't being paid to worry about that part. Pyrotechnical was standing by to play rear-guard if events went severely tits-up; she could open a doorway into a Dodge space and get everything inside in thirty seconds if she had to, but it would be a very long thirty seconds. However, everything seemed to be running smoothly.
The only hiccup—Brandish going off-script, then being whisked out of sight by Laserdream—had had her tensing and reaching for the remote. Fortunately, nothing had come of it, and she'd allowed herself to relax a little and get back to doing she was being paid for. This is why I hate the weird jobs.
As each memory set came in, it wasn't hard to strip out everything that didn't pertain to Glory Girl, then set it to meshing with what she already had. Lady Photon's and Brandish's had formed the core of this shared memory experience early on. The other kids were adding superficial amounts and filling in a few gaps here and there, but only the New Wavers and one other (she didn't know who the good-looking blond boy was, and didn't care to speculate) added a significant amount.
That didn't mean it was a perfect engram; there were always times when someone was on their own, and determining someone's state of mind or thought processes from what they were doing or saying was an inexact science. However, everyone had holes in their memories from simply forgetting what they'd done on a certain day, and emotions rarely translated into long-term storage unless they were particularly vivid, so what she had would be workable, especially if Glory Girl's memory still had fragments left to attach to.
(She still didn't know exactly what had happened to Glory Girl, and it wasn't something she intended to pry into.)
There were, of course, the two stipulations that Tattletale had insisted on from the beginning. Neither one was a deal-breaker, but the second one was going to be just a tad finicky. Don't let anyone be in love with anyone else had raised her eyebrows, and given her another hint as to what was going on. Though she suspected she'd never get the full picture.
She checked the screen and verified that the latest read (Manpower's, and was she glad the chair was built to take someone his size) had integrated with the rest. Raising her eyes, she gave Tattletale a nod. This in turn triggered a change in the music, and the second-last of the kids (if her count was correct) came 'sneaking' down the stairs.
"I-I'm here to test the chair!" the girl declared. She was wearing a bright red domino mask and looked nervous as hell. Not that Lil blamed her; stage props were one thing, but actual Tinker tech had a certain look and feel to it, especially close up.
"Sure, go ahead," she responded, readying the 'Hair Dryer'. "Just sit right here. It won't hurt a bit."
Obediently, the girl sat down, and Lil lowered the helmet over her head. The opaque visor—it helped to let the mind wander if there was no visual input—slid into place, and the girl let out a startled cry. "I can't see anything!"
Didn't she see the same thing happen with everyone else? "That's how it's supposed to be," Lil said quietly. "Just relax and let your mind wander."
"You're-you're not going to hypnotise me and make me cluck like a chicken, are you?"
"No," Lil said shortly. She was tempted to add, That's my other brain transfer machine, but decided to leave well enough alone. "Relax. Let your mind wander."
Finally, the girl calmed down enough to get a good read from her—seven seconds, not bad—and Lil raised the visor and lifted the helmet off. It took the girl a few seconds to react. "It's done? I can go?"
"It's done," Lil assured her. "You can go back up and join your friends now."
"Oh, good." The kid got up and scuttled back across the floor, to applause from the watchers.
One to go, then we can really get this show on the road. Lil went through the motions to strip out the extraneous information, then overlaid it onto the rest. As she'd expected, ninety-five percent of it integrated with pre-existing memories, with just a few new viewpoints. The rest slipped into place without any problems on the ever-growing amalgam, and she looked up to Tattletale.
When the music changed this time, it was Panacea who came out of a side corridor; wearing street clothes, certainly, but there was no mistaking her for anyone else. Also, there was no mistaking the stress she was under. The girl had circles under her eyes that belonged to someone thirty years older and going through mid-life crisis.
She didn't even bother pretending to sneak, even as those watching from above appeared to hold their breaths. Unlike Brandish, there was no uncertainty; Panacea was driven and determined. Moving with purpose, she seated herself on the chair and allowed the helmet to be lowered over her head.
"Please tell me you can fix all this," she mumbled as the visor went down.
"Do my best, hon. That's why you called in the experts. Now, try to relax and let your mind wander. This might take a little while."
"Okay." But from the white-knuckled grip Panacea had on the chair arms, relaxing was the last thing she intended to do.
Lil sighed and started the read. She was here to do a job. Let's get it done and dusted.
<><>
Tattletale
"Is it just me, or is Panacea taking longer than everyone else?" asked Bethany. She wasn't wrong; it had been more than a minute, and Amy was still under the helmet.
"She's making extra sure that Glory Girl gets all the encouragement she needs," Lisa responded automatically. "When Glory Girl gets under there, she'll be reminded of all the good times they've spent together." In a way, it wasn't even a lie. Vicky was going to be reminded of things, only not in the way Bethany thought.
I'll be a whole lot happier once this whole dog and pony show is over. The party guests couldn't simply be shooed out once they'd donated their memories. If they weren't allowed to stay and celebrate their 'victory' with the re-memoried Glory Girl, far too many questions would be asked. Still, everything seemed to be going relatively smoothly. So why am I on edge? What am I missing?
Crystal eased through the guests and tapped her on the shoulder. One look at the New Wave girl's face sent Lisa's paranoia into orbit. Shit. Shit. Fuck.
'What?' she mouthed silently.
'Office,' Crystal mimed back. That meant Coil's office, which Lisa had appropriated as the ad hoc control room for the whole complex. Whatever was going on, she'd find out about it there.
It only took her about thirty seconds to get there while moving casually enough not to draw notice, but it felt like thirty years. Whatever it is, please God let it be fixable.
When she got there, Taylor was sitting at Coil's desk, staring intently at one of the screens. How she'd gotten into the office without being noted by the guests was simple; when the bugs that were her Swarmina guise went away, she was just another teenage girl in a domino mask. However, right now, her fists were clenched so tightly that her knuckles were white in the glow of the screens.
"Circus got out," Taylor said bluntly, without looking up. "I've been trying to tag her with bugs, but she's a lot more aware of her environment right now. And she keeps doing her fire-breath thing with a lighter. I've lost three swarms, so far."
"Shit." Lisa eyed the screen, and noticed that a lot of the sub-screens were blank. "Has she been knocking out the cameras, too?"
"Yeah." Taylor's jaw was tight. "I'm pretty sure we can't catch her unawares like we did the first time. Should we maybe open the outer doors and let her go?"
"No." Lisa said the word before her brain had properly processed the question. "She won't go. She's after revenge. Specifically, on me. I'm the one she was hunting. She believes she's owed."
"And we can't just pay her?" Taylor already knew the answer to that one, but Lisa knew she had to ask it anyway.
"Nope. Between shelling out for Vicky's brain fix and this party, I'm in hock up to the eyebrows. I figure I could maybe afford a soda right now, if you were willing to spot me a quarter." It wasn't quite that bad, but Lisa knew damn well Circus wouldn't accept anything less than seventy-five percent of what she figured she was owed, and there was nothing like that in the kitty.
"So, what do we do? Send New Wave after her?" Taylor sounded hopeful at that idea.
"Yeah, that's what I'm thinking." Lisa ran her hands through her hair. "I've got Sarah watching Brandish, so I'm thinking Eric and Neil. Let Dean and Crystal run interference in the party while they're all watching Panacea in the chair."
"Oh, she just finished," Taylor reported. "Cranial's doing a lot of work right now, but she doesn't look too worried. At least, not as far as I can tell."
"She's the one thing that's got to go right," Lisa agreed.
"Yeah." Taylor gnawed on a thumbnail for a second. "What about Vicky? Who's watching her?"
"Aisha." Lisa rolled her eyes. "She might be as irritating as hell, but she's really stepping up."
"No argument here. I'll stay here and let you know if Circus shows up on camera again."
"Got it." Lisa slipped out of the office. Goddamn it. It was all going so smoothly, too.
<><>
Cranial
With the Panacea read complete and integrated with the gestalt as a whole, the finicky part of the job began. Each memory of Glory Girl seen from the outside now had to be inverted, so that it could be experienced from the inside. This meant the visuals had to be switched around, and the faces of those with her placed in the appropriate locations within the emerging memory patch.
It wasn't always possible to do this, but it wasn't a real problem. Where she didn't have an up-to-date face, she slotted one in from earlier or later, whichever worked better. And if Glory Girl ended up thinking Bethany had acquired that nice blouse a month earlier than she really did, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Memory played tricks like that sometimes, even when one's brain hadn't gone through a hard reset.
Emotions were trickier, but she had a good baseline for that as well. Glory Girl loved her mother and mourned her father, held slightly more distant familial views of her aunt and uncle and cousins, enjoyed the company of her friends, and had a very close relationship with someone who looked remarkably like the young man from upstairs. That was all well and good, and she was able to program those emotions in with relative ease.
Panacea … was more problematic. Going through her memories clued Lil in on what had started this whole debacle. She was a tangled mass of neuroses which included abandonment issues, unconscious hatred for her foster mother—wait, foster mother?
Okay, so Panacea had been adopted, but how? Lil ran back through the recorded memory. When she came to the relevant part, she blinked hard. Holy fuck, New Wave adopted Marquis' kid? How is that not common knowledge?
Deep breaths, deep breaths. Not my problem. Okay, she doesn't even know that she hates Brandish, but she does. She's also strongly in love with Glory Girl, who from her interactions has no idea of this. Had no idea. This was what Tattletale had been talking about, it had to be. After the mindwipe, the entire rudimentary personality Glory Girl had been left with was based around loving Panacea.
Okay, Glory Girl will see Panacea strictly as her sister, and nothing else.
Except that if I leave the memory of the mindwipe intact, which Tattletale says Panacea wants, Glory Girl is likely to go after Panacea and try to murder her.
Is Panacea trying to commit suicide by cape? Because pissing off Glory Girl seems to be a remarkably efficient way to do it, if the nearly-dead gangsters are any indication.
Did I mention that I hate weird jobs? I hate weird jobs.
But her price had been agreed to and the money was there, so it was time to woman up and get it done.
<><>
Shielder
The radio earpiece crackled slightly, then Taylor's voice came through. "Ready to open door 12-A. Be careful; I don't have cameras on the other side of it."
"Great," muttered Eric. A moment's concentration created a force-field bubble next to the sliding door, so that if Circus was indeed waiting in ambush on the other side, nothing would get through. "Okay, open it up."
"That force field will stop a thrown knife, right?" asked Tattletale, standing next to him in the bubble. "Circus is really good with those."
"I can tank Aunt Carol's energy blades, so yeah. It'll stop a thrown knife." Eric cleared his throat, not wanting to sound too boastful. "How laser-proof is Circus?"
"She's not." The door began to slide open. Tattletale peered through, then let out a slight huff; whether of relief or disappointment, Eric wasn't sure. "But she's insanely good at dodging, and she has all sorts of crazy things in her personal pocket dimension."
There was nobody on the other side. Eric let the bubble bulge through, then he and Tattletale entered the next section. Here and there he could see blackened spots up on the ceiling where he suspected security cameras had been mounted. "She's been busy," he observed. "How'd she manage that?"
"Minor pyrokinetic," Lisa reminded him. "All she needs is a source of flame, like a Zippo or a road flare, and she can make it into a burst of fire. Also, if she's holding a knife, assume she can stab you from any angle. She can bounce those things."
"Knives, I can handle," Manpower asserted. "Fire breath isn't so much fun."
"Transmitted heat?" asked Tattletale, though her tone suggested she knew the answer already.
"Transmitted heat," he confirmed. "Fire can't touch me directly, but it's still hot when it's half an inch away from my skin."
The door slid shut behind them and the keypad turned red again. They moved on through the base, remaining within Eric's bubble, although this slowed them down more than a little. More and more scorched security cameras showed up, though some were untouched. Eric waved at those before they moved on again.
Each room they encountered, they opened and checked within, to ensure Circus wasn't lurking there. On the third such room, there was nobody inside, but the light switch didn't work. Still, a quick sweep of an attenuated laser beam around the interior of the room showed it was empty of all but cleaning supplies.
They were about to move along when Tattletale said, "Wait, go back."
"Why?" asked Eric. "Did you see something?"
"That's the only room we've seen where the light wasn't working," she said. "There's something she doesn't want us to see in that room."
Neil shrugged. "Sometimes lights just fail." But he didn't object when they went back anyway.
This time, Lisa studied the entire room carefully, including the light fitting. It had been scorched, in the same manner as the security cameras. Turning, she pointed at the air vent cover. "That's been removed and replaced. It's what she didn't want us to see. She's in the air ducts."
Neil studied the air duct cover carefully. It wasn't much more than a foot across. "Are you sure? That's not a metal air duct, that's concrete. If anyone gets stuck, there's no rescue coming."
"I bet I could fit down it," Eric claimed. Not that he wanted to, but he totally figured he could.
"Well, you're not going to find out." Neil's tone was very much 'Dad has spoken'. "Do we have a map of the air ducts?"
Tattletale scratched the back of her neck. "Almost certainly, somewhere on the computer system. I'll have to look for it."
Eric had to know. "Okay, so if this Coil guy was as paranoid as you keep telling us, why would he have air ducts in his base that a person can crawl through?"
"It was because he was so paranoid," Tattletale explained. "He always hired big, muscular guys. Out of everyone in his crew, he was the only one skinny enough to use them to get around."
"Huh." Eric hoped he would never get that paranoid. It sounded like a miserable way to live.
"Damn right." Tattletale keyed her radio. "Problem. She's gotten into the air ducts. We need to figure out where she is, and how to flush her out. Coming back in."
"Well, shit. Ready to open 12-A on your signal."
<><>
Circus
There were only a few good things about this decision.
First, she didn't have to worry about dragging her gear along, because it was all inside her hammerspace. If she needed her Zippo to see where she was going, she could get it out with minimum fuss.
Second, whoever had set up these air ducts had ensured that there were no impossibly tight turns or even sharp edges inside. Also, for some unknown reason, there was the occasional metal plate with letters or numbers etched into it. If I knew more about the layout of this base, I might actually be able to make use of that.
Third, of course, was the fact that it was cast out of concrete, which didn't have the propensity of metal air ducting of being horribly noisy to move through and likely to collapse under the weight of a medium-sized rat.
Neither did it possess the usual accoutrements of the average supervillain base air ducts, as noted in popular fiction, such as electrified mesh or razor-edged high-speed fans. All of which led her to wonder if Coil had intended for these air ducts to be traversable. And if so, by whom?
Wait. This is Coil we're talking about. This is a guy who probably built an escape tunnel on his escape tunnel. Of course he set it up so he could vanish into the air ducts.
Great. Mystery solved. Now, if only I knew where I was, and how to get to Tattletale.
<><>
Tattletale
As soon as Lisa got back to where the party was going on, Crystal homed in on her like a guided missile. Lisa took one look at her expression, then stepped in close. "What's happened? Have you found Circus?"
"No." Crystal took a deep breath. "Cranial's been trying to get my attention, but I have no idea what she wants, and I don't want to go down there."
"Shit." With the way things were going, Lisa flashed to the worst possible interpretation. The memory recordings went wrong. She needs to do them all over again. Or she can't do it at all. Jesus, how am I going to explain this to Amy?
With this running through her head, she moved over to the rail and gestured to get the guard's attention. He turned and said something to Cranial, who seemed to brighten up under her concealing helmet. Her next gesture was something Lisa's power was easily able to decipher.
Ready to roll. Bring on Glory Girl.
She nodded and gave Cranial a discreet thumb's up before keying her radio mic. "Tango to Alpha. We're good to go. I say again, we're good to go."
There was a pause, then an answer came through. "Yo, this is Most Esteemed Alpha. I'll be bringing my girl, the Vickster, through right now. Roger dodger, over and out, rubber duckie."
With a silent prayer of thanks that Aisha had no desire to join the military in any capacity—her discipline issues aside, just her butchering of radio etiquette would probably cause aneurysms in anyone trying to train her—Lisa made the 'all okay' gesture to Cranial. Turning, she headed back toward the office where Taylor was still manning the control centre.
If anyone had suggested to me a month ago that I'd find myself in command of my very own underground base, overseeing the memory reintegration of a superhero while trying to deal with a supervillain lurking in the air ducts … I would've probably asked what they were smoking.
But that was the way her life seemed to be going these days.
<><>
Taylor
"Anything?" asked Lisa, the moment she was inside the office and the door was closed behind her. "I thought there were barriers in the air ducts that stopped people from getting around."
Taylor shook her head and leaned back in the admittedly very comfortable chair that Coil had bequeathed to the office. Closing her eyes for a moment to rest them, she sighed in aggravation. "I thought so too, until I looked more closely. There's barriers between the base and the outside air, sure. The last thing Coil wanted was people sneaking in or out. Secure areas like the cells or the armoury have tiny air ducts, like four inches across. But through the main areas of the base? Just big enough to fit a skinny person."
"Like you, or Coil, or Circus, yeah." Lisa growled under her breath. "Even dead, that asshole's paranoia is coming back to bite us. Have you found a map yet?"
"Yeah, but I don't know if it's accurate." Taylor sat forward again and hit a few keys. A diagram of the base came up on the screen, with an overlay of lines connecting the various rooms. "This might be the actual version, or it might be the one Coil had made to fool people with, while the real one is hidden in an anonymous file somewhere."
"Goddamn it." Lisa leaned in close, studying it. She didn't want to waste a use of her power quite yet; as it was, with all the demands on her, she was hovering on the edge of a migraine. "It could be. Looks real enough. But he'd make sure even the fake one looked real."
"Okay, so we flush her out and map the air ducts at the same time." Taylor glanced up at the air vent in the office. She'd shoved a filing cabinet in front of it, to make it harder for anyone trying to push it out from inside. "I don't have any special-issue rats left, but maybe Amy can—"
"Nun-uh." Lisa shook her head. "Amy's not in a good headspace to make anything to order right now. She's likely to somehow make it into a fuel-air explosive, or a nerve gas dispenser. Something we absolutely do not want in this base right now, or ever."
"Right. So we go with what we've got." Taylor grimaced. "She's really good at spotting bugs, and frying them before they can KO her."
"Okay, rats it is." Lisa ran her hands through her hair, further disarranging it. "Once you locate her, do you think you can maybe keep her busy until we're done with Vicky, and the innocents are out of here?"
"Gonna have to, aren't I?" This was getting more complicated by the second.
"And don't attack her. The last thing we want is screaming coming from the ducts and scaring the guests."
Taylor groaned and rolled her eyes. "Yes, boss."
Lisa patted her on the shoulder. "Attagirl."
<><>
Aisha
"Okay, let's go, Vickster." Aisha took a deep breath. She'd built a great rapport with Vicky so far, but all she needed now was for her charge to decide that she wanted to play patty-cake instead of coming along quietly. "Time for a new game. You want to play a cool new game?"
"I like playing games," Vicky said brightly. "Games are fun. Will Amy be playing this game with us?"
"Amy's already playing the game." It was even true, for a given definition of 'true'. "It's your turn now. I think you'll win, don't you?"
Vicky looked hesitant. "I don't want to beat Amy and make her sad."
"Oh, no, no." Aisha thought fast. "You're on Amy's side. If you do really well, you'll both win."
Vicky perked up. "Then I'll play and win, and make Amy happy."
"That's my girl." Aisha gave her a hug. "Let's go wow them all."
Hand in hand, she led Vicky out into the lower area, where Cranial was prepping the chair for Vicky. Lisa had seen them coming, and the music changed to something with a dramatic beat, as befitted the climax of the show. The nominal guests of the party had all been downstairs and sat in the chair, and now it was time for the big payoff. The girls lined the rail and clapped as she came into view.
"Oh, look, it's my friends!" Vicky waved excitedly and levitated into the air. "I'll go and say hi to them."
"No, no, not yet!" Aisha gave her a gentle downward tug. "If—if you go up there, you forfeit the game and Amy loses!"
"Oh." Vicky pouted, but she came back down to earth. "That's a stupid game."
"It's the game we're playing. Now come over here. You see that chair?"
Vicky tilted her head. "It's a silly looking chair."
"Oh, yeah. It's a stupid looking chair, alright." Aisha didn't actually think so. As far as she was concerned, it belonged in some mad Tinker's basement somewhere … which wasn't too far removed from the current situation, to be honest. "But this is the game. You have to sit in it and let that lady put that helmet on your head, and close your eyes and sit still for as long as you can. If you sit longer than everyone else, you and Amy win the game. Okay?"
Vicky nodded enthusiastically. "Okay!"
"Excellent. Here, I'll just take your tiara off." Otherwise, it would definitely interfere with the helmet.
Vicky balked. "But I want to keep my tiara on. I'm Glory Girl. I always wear my tiara."
Lowering her voice, Aisha leaned in close to Vicky. "Do you want the other girls to beat you and Amy? Because they'll totally be mean to her about it."
"No, I don't want that." Reaching up, Vicky removed the tiara from her freshly brushed hair. "Can you take care of it for me, Most Esteemed Aisha?"
Aisha nodded and took it, trying not to let the tears show in her eyes. This was probably the last time she was ever going to see the simple, happy Vicky who liked to have her hair brushed and braided, and to play patty-cake. "I can totes do that for you, Vickster. Now, go and win that game for Amy." She couldn't say any more through the lump in her throat.
Beaming, Vicky strode up to the chair and seated herself. She closed her eyes and held perfectly still as the helmet was lowered over her head, and the visor dropped into place. Stepping away, Cranial leaned over her equipment and started pressing buttons and turning dials.
Aisha couldn't watch anymore. Turning away, she saw the row of girls avidly observing to see what happened next. Some nodded to her, in a 'we're in this together' sort of way. She gave them a weak thumb's up in return.
God, I hope this works.
<><>
Taylor
"God, I hope this works." Taylor watched as Eric used his force field to lift the filing cabinet away from where she'd shoved it up against the air vent. She had eight rats resting on her shoulders and arms—all she could gather at short notice—plus a small swarm of bugs.
"It better." Eric pulled the vent cover off—Taylor had already checked with her bugs to ensure that Circus wasn't lurking within knife-throwing range inside the duct—and set it aside. "Clear."
Putting her hand up on the edge of the air duct, Taylor made the rats run up her arm and vanish into the darkness. The bugs flew with them, scouting ahead. Each time the group hit an intersection, they split their numbers and kept exploring.
As Eric put the vent cover back on and shoved the cabinet back into place, Taylor sat down at the computer and called up the diagram she'd found. Lisa had already expressed a strong suspicion that what was on the computer didn't match reality, and Taylor tended to agree with her. Coil had been a paranoid sonovabitch to the end, and this was probably no exception.
Come on … where are you … where are you …
<><>
Cranial
"Son of a bitch," muttered Lil as she ran her preliminary scan to see what sort of substrate she'd be stitching the memory patch into. She'd done individual grab-and-repair jobs before, usually involving cases of amnesia due to head trauma. That was simplicity itself compared to what was going on here.
Only the barest tag-ends of some memories were left behind, and she could see the unmistakeable signs of where someone had overlaid a new personality, then taken it away again. Whoever had done it (given what she knew already, she suspected Panacea) hadn't bothered or known to remove the memories of having had that new personality graft, however briefly. Seriously. Fucking amateurs. At least she took it away before it did too much damage.
Using all the finesse of which she was capable, she set to work sanitising the area, scraping away the damage until everything was ready for the new patch. Leaving anything underneath where it could grow and fester was merely a recipe for disaster; weeks or months or years later, brand new mental problems could surface, undoing all the work she was performing now. And I really don't want to be responsible for a powerhouse like this going off the deep end.
Finally, it was ready. She'd identified the points in her constructed gestalt where the lone fragments of memory could attach to. Once it was in place, she'd set Glory Girl to living through her reconstructed life. Not at a one-to-one ratio, of course. Nobody had the time to wait through something like that. But just as someone within a dream could live through subjective years in mere seconds, she could speed up Glory Girl's experienced time, going barely slow enough to patch any holes that cropped up.
And—fingers crossed—once Glory Girl came out the far end, she would've reformed her original personality (or something very close to it) by way of her re-lived life experiences. Unfortunately, this was the tricky bit. If something utterly life-changing had happened to her away from all the recorded memories, it wouldn't happen this time around. And Lil couldn't throw in a correction for something she knew nothing about.
But she could only work with the material she'd been given. Tattletale knew that, which was why she'd been paid the majority of the money up front.
Carefully, step by step, Lil commenced the memory implant process.
<><>
Panacea
Lurking in the shadows of a corridor entrance, Amy clenched her fist and gnawed at her knuckles. "Please let it work," she whispered. "Please let it work."
She had no idea what she would do if it didn't. All of her efforts had gone into getting to this point. She knew she wouldn't have even gotten this far if it weren't for Lisa and Taylor and Aisha. As it was, disaster had threatened on half a dozen occasions, only to be averted by the slimmest of margins. Without them, Vicky would still be a brain-wiped doll, with no chance of ever getting her life back and no way forward.
And if it went wrong now, after all this effort, all this money, had gone into it … she clenched her fists even tighter. The single bright spot in all this was the chance that her mistake could be rectified, that Vicky could be restored. If that light of hope was to be extinguished, if the darkness tarnishing her soul was to take over everything … she didn't know if she would ever come out the other side.
"Hey." It was Lisa's voice, behind her. A light hand fell on her shoulder. "Hey, Amy. It's going to be alright. Vicky'll be the same old pain in the ass once this is over and done. You'll see. Cranial came with the highest of recommendations."
"But what if it isn't alright?" Amy asked, her voice harsh with self-recrimination. "There's no way she's ever dealt with shit as bad as what I did to Vicky. I tried to fix her, but all I did was make it worse, so I had to fix that, and what if I made it so bad even Cranial can't do anything because of my fuckups?"
"And what if you didn't?" Lisa's hand slid across Amy's shoulders. "What if what you did is basically what she fixes on a Tuesday? She deals in memories. It's what she does. Trust me, I looked into her pretty damn hard before I contacted her. And you've known Vicky since forever, right? Your memories, turned around, are gonna be what fixes her. You'll see. I mean, your mom, your aunt, your uncle, whatsisface …"
Amy snorted with amusement despite herself. She could see what Lisa was trying to do, but it was still working after a fashion. "Dean. His name is Dean. And he's her boyfriend. I'll never try to get in the way of that. Maybe I should leave altogether, go somewhere else."
Self-exile sounded better and better all the time, now that she came to think of it. Once Vicky was herself again (Aisha had referred to it exactly once as restoring a save game file, before Lisa had smacked her across the top of the head) then it would be better for all concerned if she cut ties and left them to have their happy life.
Because she knew damn well Vicky wouldn't want her around. She'd emphasised to Cranial that she didn't want any remnant of the love she'd foisted on Vicky to be left behind. Once Vicky was cured, and if she chose to spare Amy's life for the horrendous sin that had been perpetrated on her …
"Don't even go there," Lisa murmured. "If Cranial does her job right, and I know she will, Vicky will know exactly how desperately hard you've been trying to get her back up to speed. Not only is she not going to punch your head off your shoulders, but she's also not going to want to chase you away. I mean, all this wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for you."
"Damn right," retorted Amy. "I'm the one who fucked Vicky over in the first place. If I hadn't let my stupid selfish wants take over, we wouldn't be in this position."
"Not stupid and not selfish," Lisa countered. "I'm pretty well ace myself, but from my understanding what you want and need isn't exactly something you can pick and choose. Sure, you're gay. Big deal. If I were a guy, I'm pretty certain I'd be drooling over Vicky every chance I got. Because holy shit, does she have it going for her."
Lisa's deadpan delivery had Amy turning and giving her a suspicious stare. "Are you mocking me?"
"Not in the slightest." Lisa's expression never shifted. "Just saying, it takes all kinds. But as for you, I'm wondering if your mistake didn't come from another source. That is, it wasn't totally your fault."
Amy blinked. "I'm not sure I follow."
"Okay, let's see. When you've been making up the birds and rats and bugs for Taylor, has it made you feel better?"
This line of questioning didn't actually improve Amy's level of confusion. "Well, yeah, actually. It was like I was doing something right, to help Vicky."
"Mm-hmm." Lisa rapped on Amy's skull with her knuckles. "That's where your problem is, then. In there."
"So, me. I'm the problem." Amy stared at her defiantly. "That's what I've been saying all along."
"Nope. Your corona pollentia. Your gemma." Lisa raised an eyebrow. "Your powers, dumbass."
Amy gritted her teeth at Lisa's patronising tone. "I know what the corona pollentia and the gemma do. Probably better than you do. What about my powers?"
"Well, for starters, have you ever heard of capes who tried to hang up the mask but just couldn't help getting back into the game?" Lisa tilted her head. "No? I have. They want to retire, but their powers just … come out. And they get forced back into it. It's not a hugely common thing, but I've also heard of people trying to defend reckless power use by saying their powers just activated all by themselves. Usually a power that they're trying to never use, like ever."
"What are you trying to say?" Amy shook her head as she stared at Lisa. "You can't be saying what that sounds like … can you?"
"I don't know." Lisa shrugged, apparently attempting unconcern. "Funny thing with my power. If I use it too much, I get headaches. A really strenuous bout will have me laid up with a migraine for a day or more. Classic Thinker headache, yeah? But if I try to never use my power, if I repress it altogether or restrict what I use it for, it kicks in anyway, usually giving me information that will push me toward bad decisions. Almost like …" She trailed off, gesturing for Amy to finish the thought.
"Almost like it's punishing you for not using it?"
Lisa snorted. "Maybe. Or maybe it just wants to be used in new and interesting ways, and doesn't have a hassle with how interesting things get."
"Okay, yeah, your power's got issues. Understood." Amy shook her head. "But my power doesn't ever go wrong like …" She paused, a terrible realisation flooding through her. Go wrong like that. "Oh. Oh, shit."
"Mm-hmm." Lisa didn't say anything else, just stood there looking at her with a sympathetic expression on her face.
"No." Amy shook her head, trying to feel justified with the strength of the denial. "No, I've healed hundreds of people, flawlessly. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands?" She didn't know. Somewhere along the way, she'd lost count. "Sometimes I've wanted to screw something up, just so I could take a step back, but I never have."
"Yeah, you've healed people." Lisa tilted her head for emphasis. "All you ever do is heal people. You don't go out and create new and interesting plants, or animals. Building explosive birds was the most fun you'd had in forever, wasn't it? Because it let you use your power in a totally new way, and it rewarded you with a dopamine hit. And it's making you feel crappy about healing."
"It felt great," Amy agreed. "I didn't know why. My power … why? Healing people is a good thing to do."
"I have no idea," Lisa confessed. "When I ask my power about this sort of thing, it goes, 'what thing?'. But it's happening. If you know where to look, you can totally see people being manipulated by their powers, even in small ways. And if I had to guess … I'd say it wants variety."
"Well, shit." Amy slumped against the wall. "My power thinks I'm boring."
"Could be worse." Lisa grinned suddenly. "If your power thinks you're boring, what if all of Leet's accidents aren't because he's a shitty Tinker?"
Amy's eyes opened wide. The scrawnier half of Uber and Leet had a well-deserved reputation for Tinker tech that fell apart, malfunctioned in some pretty impressive ways, or just plain refused to work at exactly the wrong time. "If that's deliberate … what's it trying to do? Kill him?"
"Either that, or it's doing its best to get his attention before he accidentally kills himself." Lisa shrugged, very obviously discarding the topic. "So let's suppose you've been essentially feeding your power a diet of unsweetened tapioca for the last few years, and all it wants is some spice in its diet. And in a moment of weakness, it takes your unconscious desires and makes them real. You know why you couldn't fix it?"
The conclusion was obvious, especially given how Lisa had framed it. "My power didn't want me to. It wants me to go on and do more."
"Bingo." Lisa waved at the base around them. "And look at what you've done so far."
"So, why do I still feel like shit?" Even now, Amy could feel the miles-deep abyss calling to her, inviting her to submerge herself in the depths of angst once more.
Lisa waved out toward the open area, where Cranial was working on her gadgetry, with Vicky sitting in the chair. "What's happening out there?"
"They're fixing my mistake … oh. Oh, crap."
"Mm-hmm." Lisa nodded in Amy's direction. "Your power doesn't think it was a mistake. Its modification of Vicky is being reversed, as much as possible. We're changing things back to the way they were. No more abominations of biology." She laced her fingers in front of her. "Back to a steady diet of unsweetened tapioca."
"So what do I do?" asked Amy desperately. "How do I stop it doing this again? I can't just start modifying brains. That goes against everything I believe in."
Lisa shrugged. "Then don't. Do something else. Make glow-in-the-dark squirrels or airborne jellyfish. Pets to order, with as many legs, eyes and other appendages as your clients want. Hell, you could make an absolute killing as a transhumanist plastic surgeon. So long as it's not just plain vanilla healing anymore."
"I can't." The realisation hit Amy like a freight train. "Carol would—"
"Then leave New Wave." Lisa's tone was firm. "You were already considering it. Go ahead and just do it. No matter how this pans out, your relationship with them is never going to be the same again." She rapped Amy's forehead, right between her eyes. "Your happiness is more important."
"You mean it?" Amy looked searchingly at Lisa. "You're not just saying that?"
Lisa snorted. "I would lie to a great many people about a great many things, but right here and right now, I'm telling the unvarnished truth. Hell, you can move in here with me and Taylor and Aisha, if you want. It's not like we don't have the room."
It was a huge leap, but Amy felt she had no other choice in the matter. "Okay. So long as Vicky turns out okay, I think I'll take you up on that." As she said the words, she felt the burden on her begin to lift.
"Good to hear it." Lisa put her arm around Amy's shoulders. "So, there's this other little problem we've got …"
<><>
Circus
Coil, you sneaky bastard.
She'd nearly gone past it, feeling her way in the dark, but her elbow had brushed a panel that swung inward. Backing up slightly, she nudged it all the way open and flicked her Zippo to reveal a tiny cubby-hole. With a little contortion, she managed to wriggle inside, where a light switch allowed her to see what she'd stumbled upon.
Barely ten feet by ten, it was a bunker within a bunker; food, water, weapons, a camp bed, a chemical toilet. Plus, a screen that allowed her to tap into the security cameras.
She could see everything that was going on, and they had no idea where she was.
And best of all, as she flicked through, she could see one particular face, plain as day.
There you are.
End of Part Fourteen
Part Fifteen: Day's End
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One Bad Day
Part Fifteen: Day's End
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Taylor
Just as Lisa sidled into the office, Taylor swore and ripped another sheet off the pad to lay alongside the others. This allowed her to extend the air duct onward with the assistance of a ruler. In the back of her mind, she kept pace with the skittering rodents and their accompanying bugs.
"How goes the search?" Lisa seemed pleased with herself.
"We were right." Taylor made another ruled line on the paper. "The official map isn't quite accurate. Oh, it looks good, if you don't pay too much attention to exact distances, but I'm pretty sure not all those angles are ninety degrees. And there are offshoots that could be missed if you're not paying attention."
"And you haven't located Circus yet." It wasn't a question on Lisa's part.
"Not yet," Taylor confirmed, "but I haven't found any more open air vents yet, and no more cameras have gone down. Better yet, even with the extra ductwork, I haven't had to leave any holes in the sweep, so she either has to kill the bugs and rats or get seen by them. Either way, I locate her."
"Excellent." Lisa slapped Taylor on the shoulder, but lightly. "When you do find her, let me know. I spoke to Amy, and she's on board with making more specialty critters to hunt her out. We were thinking of fireproof, knifeproof rats."
"Make sure they can't breed," Taylor cautioned. "If they leave my control radius, we do not want things like that getting out and causing trouble."
"More trouble than exploding pigeons?" retorted Lisa with a smirk. "Don't worry. I'll tell her."
With a final fingertip wave, she slipped out of the office again. Taylor growled another curse and filled in a little more of the air duct map.
"Where are you?" she muttered.
Circus
Coil had been lavish in supplying his little redoubt. The stored water was welcome after the breakout from the cell and the arduous crawl through the air ducting. Even more welcome were the protein bars; she'd spotted a crate of MREs, but decided she wasn't that hungry yet.
Gnawing on a protein bar and sipping from a square bottle of water, she sat cross-legged on the rubber matting and flicked through the selection of security feeds available to her on the small screen mounted on the low desk. There wasn't much to see in the area of the base she'd come from; not even the New Wave capes were back there right now. What's with that, anyway? What are they doing, chumming around with that skank Tattletale?
She shelved the question for another time, such as 'never'. The answers she wanted had more to do with how to get her hands on Tattletale, and how to extract her rightfully earned goddamn pay from that slippery little bitch. If Tattletale had access to Coil's money, and everything she'd ever heard about the supposedly psychic Thinker said that was a very strong fucking possibility, then the only obstacle standing in the way of getting her money was her unwillingness to threaten Tattletale's well-being.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as that, or she would've slithered out through the nearest air duct, put her hands around Tattletale's throat, and squeezed until she got what was owed to her. New Wave was on site, along with a couple of capes she'd never heard of before (at least, she assumed they were capes), and then there were the Toybox Tinkers down in the lower section, operating that weird chair. She knew enough to recognise Cranial and Pyrotechnical when she saw them, but she had no idea what they were doing here, or why Tattletale had seen fit to throw a fucking party in a goddamn supervillain base. Maybe the chair gave them some kind of Tinkertech high?
Did Tattletale blow my fucking money on a fucking party accessory?
She wasn't quite sure what the black girl with the purple streak in her hair was supposed to be able to do, but the tall skinny one with the black curly hair was definitely the Master who'd been setting swarms of bugs on her. She had a bone to pick with that one too; making spiders web her foot to the grating had not been cool. But Tattletale was her main target, and everything else was secondary.
The question is, do I wait for the party to finish and for everyone else to leave, or just come out now and kick Tattletale's ass until she ponies up the money I'm owed?
Nah, fuck that. If she leaves along with the normies, then I'm back to square one.
Let's fucking do this.
Cranial
With the engram completed, it still took two tries for Lil to anchor it to Glory Girl's tattered personality matrix. On the second attempt, she took extra care and double-checked all her readouts, then held her breath as she ran through the process, one step at a time. Finally, she was able to confirm that it was properly seated.
Next came the final stage in the process: running Glory Girl through a high-speed version of her life (that is, high-speed from the outside) to seal the engram into place, paper over any holes (because there would be holes) and generate an actual personality at the far end. While Lil had a certain amount of control over the process, she could only work with what she'd been given. Fortunately, Tattletale had managed to assemble a considerable amount of experiential data with which to assemble and adjust her very first entire-life engram, so she was confident she could pull it off.
Mostly.
This was the stage where if anything went wrong, it would have to be fixed or circumvented as they went. There was no question of stopping it and then restarting; the discontinuity that would inevitably occur would invalidate the entire process. And if she stopped it because something had gone sideways and tried to restart from scratch, the necessary removal of previously implanted memories would risk actual damage to Glory Girl's already-abused neural structure. Any kind of second attempt would be highly ill-advised.
Lil had never done something this ambitious before, but she'd gone over the specs for her equipment before agreeing to it. She could handle it. She would handle it. Glory Girl would be a hero again, and Toybox's rep would get another boost from people in the know.
Setting her teeth into her lower lip, she started the run-through. Glory Girl's eyes flickered back and forth as though she were asleep and dreaming, which was a good sign. Lil had generic memories queued for any holes that might crop up; with luck, they wouldn't even have to slow down as she slapped on the patch. Fortunately, she had plenty of images of Flashbang, both in costume and out. For anything else, she'd improvise on the fly.
As Victoria Dallon's early years whipped by, she narrowed her eyes and kept a careful watch for emerging problems. This wasn't just about the money anymore. Her pride was on the line.
Taylor
"Oh, what the fuck?" Taylor stared at her map of the air ducting as her rats milled around in the far corner from where they'd begun. They had traced every single air duct and even thrown their little bodies against each vent cover in turn to make sure said covers were securely screwed in place. They were all solid as a rock, except for the one that Circus had used to gain entry to the network. "How did she get past me?"
That Circus hadn't just turned around and left the same way she'd come in was patently obvious. People like Circus didn't just give up. Besides, that would've involved either squirming backwards with no way to see where she was going, or somehow turning around, something that Taylor felt would be nigh-impossible for anyone but a trained contortionist.
In any case, if Circus had done that, it would make her less of a problem. Taylor had to assume she was still dangerous, still on the board somehow. But what did she do? How did she pull that off? It's not like she can turn intangible like Sophia could, or invisible.
She paused. Waiiit a minute.
Tattletale
The party was going well, and so (Lisa hoped) was Cranial's work to restore Vicky to a recognisable semblance of her former self. She'd been leaning on her power a little too much, so she was reluctant to tap it now, but the Tinker appeared calm and unflustered as she worked on the screens attached to the chair. Even Vicky sat calmly under the oversized helmet, not even bothering to fidget.
Aisha had joined the party, her upbeat personality doing a great job at keeping the festivities going. In the meantime, Eric and Crystal had were also circulating while Manpower and Lady Photon were watching the unconscious Brandish. What they were going to do about Brandish, Lisa wasn't entirely sure yet. Excising this particular event from her memory would be prohibitively expensive, and Cranial probably didn't want her anywhere near the chair anyway.
Which brought her around to the last two players in the current little drama: Circus and Taylor. Circus being the problem, and Taylor being the potential solution.
Easing away from the rest of the group as Aisha did a manic (and somehow on-point) impression of Armsmaster trying to deal with hypothetical super-powered graffiti artists, Lisa snuck away into the office once more. It was her job to make sure everything was going well, she told herself. She wasn't micromanaging.
"How's it going?" she asked, once the door slid shut behind her.
"Problematic." Taylor didn't look up from the map she'd made. "I searched the air ducts that she could've gone through, from one end to the other. She's not there. Or she's figured out a way to hide."
Lisa blinked. "That's not good. That's not good at all. Please tell me you figured out a solution."
"Yeah." Taylor grinned. "Smell."
It took a second for Lisa to get it. "Oh. Rats can track by scent?"
"How do you think they can find where people hide their food?" asked Taylor rhetorically. "Damn right they can track by scent. They just don't normally track humans. But I sent them back to where she got into the air duct system, and they're on her trail right now. No matter what bullshit tactic she used to hide from them, they'll be able to find her."
"So, we've got her?" Lisa really, really wanted that to be true.
"Not yet." Taylor waggled her hand in the air. "But we're closing in on her, me and my beady-eyed minions."
Lisa shuddered, imagining trying to crawl through an air duct while a bunch of rats scuttled up behind her. It was only just preferable to being under Coil's thumb, and even that was kind of debatable. Still, it wasn't happening to her. Circus was another matter altogether. She wished the rats all the luck in finding the irritating cape.
If she'd just cut her losses from the beginning, we wouldn't be doing this.
Taylor
"Okay, this is weird." Taylor held up her hand just as Lisa was about to leave the office again.
"Weird good or weird bad?" Lisa did an about-face and stared at Taylor. "I can't handle many more unpleasant surprises today, just saying."
Taylor concentrated, trying to figure out what her rats had found. "There's some kind of … swinging panel in the wall of the air duct. I didn't see it before because I wasn't looking for it. But the rats smelled where she stopped and crawled into it."
"The fuck?" Lisa indicated the carefully drawn map of the air duct system. "You mean there's more to that shit?"
"Maybe." Taylor bit her lip. "The panel's pretty heavy. If I send a rat in there, it might be a one-way trip."
Lisa rolled her eyes. "So, send it in there. We need to know where she went to."
"Okay, then." Taylor had the rat push all the way through. It tried to hold onto the concrete and climb down, but the surface was too smooth, and it lost its grip. Fortunately, it only fell a short distance, as best Taylor could gauge, then landed on rubber matting. Being a rat, it bounced.
As it scuttled around, using its whiskers for guidance and sniffing everything it encountered, Taylor sketched out the layout of the space it had found itself in. She labelled each new section with her best guess at what it contained; protein bars, water bottles, a small desk with a computer screen … Fuck.
Lisa took one look at her face. "What? What is it?"
"Guns. She's got guns and ammo."
"Well, shit."
Circus
Okay, this is as good a place as any. She peered out through the grille at where the teen girls were enthusiastically partying under the tolerant gaze of (she presumed) their respective mothers. For some obscure reason, everyone was wearing a domino mask, even the publicly known heroes Laserdream and Shielder, who were also partying hearty.
The presence of the heroes served to damp down her immediate impulse to just jump in there and grab Tattletale. I'm going to have to be smart about this. There had to be a way to get her money and get away afterward, without being lasered to a crisp or beaten to a pulp.
Looking at the laughing crowd, gathered around the girl who was currently doing a standup routine of some kind, she grimaced. All those people could be problematic; once she revealed herself, they were likely to run around and cause more havoc, making it hard for her to keep an eye on where all the capes were. How to turn that from a problem into an asset …
A solution presented itself. Not one she usually went with; in fact, she preferred to stay as far away from bystanders as possible, but this situation just was not a normal one.
Fuck it, hostage it is.
Laserdream
As Aisha reached the climax of her improv Armsmaster skit, Crystal was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes. How such a petite girl managed to pull off the 'Robomaster' growl so expertly she had no idea, but it was perfect.
The first inkling she had of a problem was when Aisha cut off halfway through a line of dialogue and stared at—no, past—her, eyes widening. And then, from behind her, the girl she knew as Bethany screamed.
She turned fast, a laser already powering up in her right hand while her left generated a force shield. Off to the side, she registered Eric doing the same, as they'd practised. But the situation was already problematic; there stood Circus, holding Bethany around the neck with a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. The villain looked a little the worse for wear, and had a glint in her eye that suggested she was no longer quite sane anymore.
"Okay, everyone, calm the fuck down." Despite the phrasing, Circus didn't look or sound like she was taking her own advice. "Nobody freaks and does something stupid, nobody gets hurt." She gestured with the pistol. "Everyone who's not a cape, get over here, right now."
"Wh-what?" quavered a woman, probably Bethany's mother; Crystal didn't know for certain. "Why? Please don't hurt my daughter."
"Not gonna hurt her, unless she does something stupid, you do something stupid, or someone else does something stupid." Circus bit the words off tightly. "Now, I don't feel like getting my face lasered off, so get over here before I do something regrettable to your kid." She gestured again with the pistol, keeping the knife close to some very important blood vessels in Bethany's throat. "Same goes for everyone else here who's not a cape. Get over here. The more of you who are between me and the New Wave laser folk, the less chance someone dies through friendly fire. Got it?"
Bethany's mother was the first to do what she was told, moving over to stand next to her daughter. One by one, the others followed her lead, looking around as though silently asking whether this was part of the 'cape experience' they'd been promised, or whether things had just gone drastically wrong.
"Circus …" Crystal spoke carefully, trying to hit the right note so she didn't set off the unstable villain. "You might want to think this all the way through. There's many ways this doesn't end well, and if you start hurting civilians, it will go bad for you very quickly indeed."
"Well, lucky for the civilians I'm not here to hurt them, then." Circus' eyes flicked from one point to another, then down at where Cranial was working with her chair on the next level. "What's that all about, anyway? Actually, fuck it, I just don't care. Every member of New Wave who can throw a laser or put up a force field, I want you on the other side of that door." Her pistol barrel indicated one of the heavy sliding doors at the far end of the room.
"If you think we're going to leave you alone with the hostages—" began Eric hotly.
"—you're absolutely right," Crystal cut him off. "Come on. We'll go." Carefully, she didn't look at where Aisha had been … or had she? Even after having known the quirky girl for several days, it was still difficult to actually remember her existence on occasion.
Gallant was another matter altogether. Out of costume, he was just another teenage boy in a domino mask. His armour might have given him a fighting chance against Circus, but as it was, his emotion blasts might or might not send her over the edge. At the moment, he was part of the crowd around Circus, but Crystal knew he had to be assessing the chances of doing something when he got the chance.
"What about me?" Amy chose this moment to speak up. "You know me. Everyone knows me. Take me as a hostage instead of everyone else. Nobody's going to do anything when my life is on the line." She rolled her eyes. "If I get hurt, I might have to miss out on healing someone, and wouldn't that be a fucking shame."
"You know what?" Circus tilted her head. "Normally I might've taken you up on that, but right now I'm reading levels of 'fuck-this' from you that I don't really trust." As she spoke, the pistol vanished from her hand, to be replaced by a set of handcuffs. She tossed them overhand toward Amy, to land with a clatter at the healer's feet. "Cuff yourself to the handrail there, just to make sure you don't try pulling off some stupid kind of sacrifice play that doesn't accomplish anything except getting people killed."
Amy glared at her, but grudgingly bent over and took up the cuffs. "Why don't you just fuck off?" she demanded as she clicked the metal into place on the rail. "There's nothing for you here."
"And that's where you're wrong." Circus was hidden behind her human shield, but Crystal could hear the smugness in her voice. "I'm fucking owed. Coil had millions when he was ganked, and I want what he owed me. Give me that, and I'm gone."
"Okay, sure." Crystal didn't know how legitimate the claim was, but she'd sat in on hostage-negotiation seminars. Gotta keep her happy until we can take her down. "You'll get your money."
"Yeah, as if you've got any say in that." Circus's tone went straight back to 'cynical' faster than an Empire thug thinking up a new slur. "I told you New Wave assholes, through that door. Now, or Panacea gets some business. Got me?" The pistol waved in the air for a second. "And take Glory Girl with you too. Don't think I didn't recognise her in that stupid fucking chair."
"No." Cranial's voice cut across the murmurs of fear echoing in the chamber. "Glory Girl is not to be moved. This is a very delicate part of the procedure. She doesn't leave this chair until I say so."
"And if she says Glory Girl doesn't move, I say Glory Girl doesn't move." Pyrotechnical hadn't spoken in Crystal's hearing up until this point, but the chk-hmmmmmm from the heavy rifle-like weapon he carried backed up his words with a certain amount of weight.
Circus must have heard it too, because she didn't bother arguing. "Ooookay, then. Not sure what's going on down there, but so long as you keep yourselves to yourselves, I honestly do not give two-thirds of a flying fuck. Now, New Wavies, time to wavie goodbye, or I am going to stab someone. Three … two …one …"
"Okay, we're going, we're going." Hastily, Crystal grabbed Eric by the arm. "Come on, let's go, like the nice lady says." Lifting into the air, she flew toward the exit, dragging him along with her.
As they flew, his force field enclosed them, then a second one inside the first. This was a trick he'd learned early on; how to create a soundproof barrier. "You can't just leave them alone with her!" he protested.
"We can't stay," she countered. "Anyway, we're the visible capes. Aisha and Lisa and Taylor and Dean are right there, and Mom and Dad are downstairs with Aunt Carol, so if shit goes sideways they can come up and kick her ass. Once we're out of sight, she'll relax, maybe let down her guard or something."
"Jeez, I hope you're right about this." But he didn't resist her pull anymore. Together, they flew to the door; he dropped the shields and she slapped the button to open it. It rumbled open and they stepped through.
Aisha
Come on ... come on …
Being able to make people forget she was there was all well and good, but the unwilling bunch of human shields Circus had gathered around herself meant that Aisha couldn't get to her. She was totes willing to stabbify the party-crasher until the beeyatch fell over—nobody threatens my friends!—but as she'd learned previously, it helped a shit-ton if they didn't actually move around. Or have people standing around them who didn't know Aisha was there and trying to help.
Wrapping her hand around the swastika-topped knife she'd used to kill Shadow Stinker, Aisha left it in its sheath as she prowled around the outside of the crowd, looking for a way through. No sense in accidentally stabbing one of the hostages, after all. Some of them were actually pretty cool, once they got into the party spirit. Also, Lisa would probably yell at her.
"Okay, no need to hurt anyone." Lisa stuck her head out of the office. "Come on in, and we'll discuss your recompense."
"About fucking time. Everyone, head for that doorway. Don't go in. I'm pretty sure the room isn't big enough for us all." Circus waved her pistol forward, like a baton or something.
This was Aisha's chance. Darting around the perimeter of the crowd, she ducked in through the open doorway into the office. Taking up a position in a vacant corner, she poised herself, ready to pull her knife and stick it into anywhere on Circus she could reach.
Circus came in next, and hit the button to close and lock the door, watching Lisa and Taylor carefully. Then she looked around the room; for a moment, Aisha tensed, wondering if Circus could see her anyway, but the villain's eyes skated right over her. Finally, Circus pointed at the air vent, which had a filing cabinet pushed up against it. "Get that open."
Aisha could understand why she was doing it—if things went to shit, it was always good to have a bolt-hole—but the only place for the cabinet to go was the corner Aisha had chosen to lurk in. Grumbling to herself, she shifted locations while Lisa and Taylor applied their shoulders to the cabinet and scraped it aside. It was short work for Lisa to unscrew the grille and set it aside. "That better?"
"Much." Circus nodded in approval. "Now, as for my money …" She flipped a knife in the air and caught it again. Aisha pulled her own knife and started stalking her, but every time she thought she had a proper stab lined up, Circus would move. It was very irritating.
"Okay. The money." Lisa leaned over the keyboard and typed in a command, and the screen changed. "I'm going to lay it out for you. Total honesty up front. Okay?"
Circus glowered at her, not ceasing the restless pacing. "That doesn't sound like 'I've got your money right here'. In fact, it's starting to sound like an excuse. I'm not doing excuses right now."
"The immediate problem," Lisa began again, "is that once the PRT discovered that Coil was Calvert, they froze a lot of his assets. I managed to recover some—in fact, I recovered quite a bit—but nowhere near his total holdings. However, I can put what money I have into generating a lot more. Enough to pay you off. All you need is patience."
"No." Circus pointed at the figures on the screen. "That, right there, is enough to cover what I'm owed, plus ten percent asshole tax. I'll be taking that."
Lisa didn't look at the screen. "I'm afraid you're mistaken. That money right there? That's already spoken for. It's going to Toybox. I can get more—like I said, with time and effort, I can definitely generate enough to pay you off—but that's not mine to give you."
The pistol had vanished somewhere—Aisha really wanted to know how Circus pulled that shit—but the knife was still in her hand. Moving like a striking snake, Circus grabbed Taylor around the neck and held the knife up under her jaw, the very tip pricking her skin. Aisha froze, watching the tiniest droplet of blood well around the point of the blade. If I stabbed her now, she'd kill Taylor before I could stop her.
"I didn't say you're giving it to me." The villain's tone could've been used to jump-start a new ice age. "I said I was taking it. You can tell Toybox you're generating the money for them. That money right there is mine, and I'm taking it, or your skinny friend here develops a sudden and fatal case of laryngitis."
She is not hurting Taylor. No fucking way am I letting that happen. Aisha was fond of the tall gawky girl, especially since they'd worked together to put an end to Shadow Stalker. Taylor didn't have that many friends, and Aisha was pleased to be one of them.
"You kill me, you'll never get your money." Taylor's voice was muffled, mainly because she was only moving her lips, not the rest of her mouth.
"She's right." Lisa spoke firmly. "And besides, she's not the one you're pissed at. You've never even met her before. I'm the one you've got a bone to pick with."
Aisha realised exactly what Lisa had in mind, and started moving carefully, while sliding her knife back into its sheath. Lisa was trying to goad Circus into taking her hostage, and thus take the heat off Taylor. And at the same time, she was banking on Aisha being in the room and being able to take advantage of the knife being moved between the two of them.
"That's true." Circus shoved Taylor away and made a grab for Lisa. "She can—"
She'd moved before Aisha was properly ready, but this would be her best chance. Launching herself forward, she tackled Circus away from both Lisa and Taylor, grabbing for the villain's knife hand. Taken off balance, Circus let out a loud whoof as they hit the wall, but she was still lucid enough to roll to the side and throw Aisha off.
"Okay, what the fuck was—" As Circus went to scramble to her feet, Lisa and Taylor tackled her, both wrestling for the knife. Circus produced the pistol in her other hand, and Aisha darted in to grab it, preventing Circus from pointing it at anyone. Screaming incoherently, Circus pulled the trigger anyway, deafening her; the bullet shattered the light, leaving the computer screen to illuminate the room.
Aisha wanted to pull her blade and stab the bitch, but both her hands were taken up with keeping the pistol pointed away from everyone (including her) because Circus was fucking strong. So, she did the next best thing, and bit Circus on the thumb as hard as she could. Circus flailed, and the pistol went flying across the room.
They wrestled across the floor, Aisha concentrating on making sure Circus couldn't grab anything out of her bullshit pocket dimension with that hand, while Taylor and Lisa kept her from stabbing them with the other hand. If anyone had told her before this point that it would be almost impossible for three teenage girls to keep one adult woman in check, she would've scoffed mightily. Three on one? There was no way anyone could beat that.
Circus, it turned out, could beat that. She was almost inhumanly agile, stronger than any two of them put together, and she was really good at fighting. She twisted, kicked, thrashed and applied moves Aisha never would've thought of—and she fought dirty. Although she should've still been imperceptible, Aisha found herself flung off the dogpile and skidding across the floor.
Before she could throw herself back into the fray, Circus used the now-free hand to apply some leverage. First Lisa and then Taylor ended up piling against the far wall, then Circus pulled some judo bullshit flip that got her to her feet. She'd lost the knife during the melee, but that didn't seem to bother her, as she pulled out a fucking machine-pistol from thin air.
"Okay, then," she snarled, the words barely audible to Aisha through the ringing in her ears. "That's it. I'm done with you assholes." She pulled back something on the gun, making an ominous clack-clack noise. "Sayonara, motherfuckers."
She raised the weapon, sighting down the barrel toward Lisa. Her intent was obvious: kill her main target first, then spray the rest of the room. Just because she couldn't perceive Aisha didn't mean the bullets wouldn't kill her just the same.
"W-wait," Taylor croaked. "Something you've … you've forgotten."
"The fuck you talking about?" demanded Circus.
Aisha saw Taylor grin. "I don't just control bugs."
And that was when the seven rats erupted from the open air duct, directly behind Circus. The first she knew of them was when they clawed all over her head, going for her eyes. It would've taken a will of steel to keep the machine pistol aimed while this happened, something Circus apparently lacked.
Letting out a shriek that threatened to deafen Aisha all over again, she let go the machine-pistol, allowing it to clatter to the ground, while she grabbed for the rats assaulting her. Aisha took the opportunity to go for the previously discarded pistol, while Lisa dived for the gun Circus had just dropped. Circus wasn't entirely unaware of what was going on around her, though, as evidenced by the neat snap-kick that sent Lisa tumbling backward again.
And then, just as Circus threw the last rat away from her, and Aisha was figuring out which way around the pistol was supposed to point, the sliding door into the office opened with a grinding screech. A slender figure was silhouetted in the doorway. "Hi. Miss me?"
Pulling yet another fucking gun out of nowhere, Circus swung it straight-armed toward the newcomer. Glory Girl caught it in her hand and crushed it with a simple metallic crunch. Then she stepped forward and back-handed the villain into the wall; Circus hit hard, bounced off, then collapsed bonelessly to the floor.
Dusting her hands off, Vicky looked around with satisfaction. "Okay, so I know most of what's going on around here, but I'm not totally sure why Amy's handcuffed to the rail out there and Circus is in here fighting you two … oh, you three. Hi, Aisha. Would someone care to fill me in?"
Two Hours Later
Taylor
After a quick explanation, Vicky had gone out and joined the party. Taylor, cloaking herself in a hastily gathered swarm, went out also as Swarmina, and was duly 'defeated' to cheers from the guests and their mothers. Once Aisha came out as well and passed off the Circus incident as a last-ditch effort by the fictitious Mind-Melter to foil the intended rescue attempt, Bethany and her mother looked somewhat mollified.
It was funny, Taylor mused, how rapidly they'd modified their own memories, given the new 'information', to the point that they thought they'd been in no danger at all. Bethany was actually proud she'd been picked as the hostage, and her friends were quick to boast about how they'd seen through it the whole time.
The party had wound down a little while after that, and the Pelham fliers volunteered to return their guests to their homes; the girls had left chatting excitedly how cool the whole experience had been. Vicky had suggested that she could ferry Dean home, but Lisa had nixed that idea. It was best, she decided, that he be dropped at the PRT building (after everyone else) so that he could declare himself officially unkidnapped.
Which left Taylor, Amy, Aisha, Vicky, Lisa and Mr Pelham sitting around a table in the base commissary. The story had been told in its entirety, with Aisha interjecting now and again, as was her habit. Amy sat at the opposite end of the table to Vicky—by choice, not by chance—with her head down and shoulders hunched, as though expecting to be physically attacked at any moment.
"So, I gotta ask," Aisha said, irrepressible as ever. "What's it feel like? Do you feel like you in there?"
Vicky tilted her head as she considered the question. "Well, yes. Who else would I feel like?" She grinned at Aisha. "Cranial did a really good job. Everything she implanted feels genuine, and even though I know intellectually that most of them aren't memories I personally experienced, I honestly can't tell between the ones from elsewhere and the few that I'm pretty sure are original issue."
Amy lifted her head. "Why?" she asked, so quietly she almost went unheard.
It took Vicky a moment or so to look around. "Why what? Why haven't I done what you so clearly want me to do, and killed you for what you did to me?"
Mr Pelham started half out of his seat at that. "Amy! Vicky! What—"
Vicky waved him down. "It's all good. Yeah, Ames really did a number on me, and I've got every right to be pissed at her. And yeah, I am. But I'm more angry at myself for not seeing what was right in front of me, what was going through her mind. What happened that day was more than a little my fault, and I need to take responsibility for my own actions. And my failures to act."
Amy jumped up. "You can't just forgive me for what—"
"Forgive? No." Vicky shook her head. "Not exactly, anyway. If I'm to understand what Lisa says, it was at least partially your power's fault, playing on your attraction to me. And also my power, making you fall in love with me, when it didn't do that to anyone else. So yes, there's plenty of blame to be had, and it can be spread far and wide."
"No!" The anguish in Amy's voice rang from the concrete ceiling. "I did this! I did it! Me! I fucked your brain up! Why aren't you punishing me?"
Vicky looked at her with sorrow and empathy. "Because there's nothing I can do that will hurt you one-tenth as much as the pain you've been putting yourself through. And because you willingly put yourself through that hell just to make sure that I'd be okay, in the end." She took a deep breath. "But if we can't guarantee it will never happen again—and we can't—then it's best we not be on the same team anymore."
"What, you're leaving New Wave?" Mr Pelham looked shocked.
"No, you can't, not on my account!" Amy shook her head violently. "I—I was going to leave anyway. I don't—I can't be on the same team as Carol, either. Not anymore. Not after today."
"Me, too." Vicky looked at her uncle apologetically. "Same person, different reasons. I'm thinking I might join the Wards." She paused. "Uh—unless you were already going there, Amy?"
"No." Amy glanced at Lisa. "I got another offer. Lisa, Taylor and Aisha were going to be forming a team right here, and they said I could stay if I wanted."
"I'll be needing to go into the PRT building too," Taylor noted. "Probably the first thing tomorrow, so they can tell me I'm not in trouble. Lisa?"
Lisa nodded. "You should still have time by then. Just don't tell them anything about … well, anything."
Taylor snorted. "Yeah, I think I got that one already."
Amy roused herself again. "What about Circus and Carol?"
Mr Pelham looked at her curiously. "Circus goes to the PRT, and Carol goes back to her house. Why?"
"I think she's saying, they're likely to start shouting about what happened tonight," Aisha chimed in helpfully. "Brandish is gonna have all sorts of fun stories to tell about being held against her will, an' drugged by bugs an' stuff. And I can tell Circus will draw 'em a map to this place, on the off-chance it'll fuck Lisa over once an' for all."
"Ah," said Vicky, realisation settling in on her features. "Yeah. Mom would totally do that. And I can believe that of Circus, too." She looked at Amy. "You're saying we should do something about that? Maybe call Cranial back?"
"Hahaha, nope." Lisa shook her head definitively. "We absolutely can't afford her rates, right now. And she charges through the nose when it comes to having unwilling capes in her chair."
Amy's features were creased in something approaching pain. "This sort of shit is what started this whole mess. If—if I do something about this … have I still got a place here?"
Taylor tilted her head curiously. "When you say 'do something about this' … what did you have in mind?" Please don't say kill them … please don't say kill them …
"I won't remove any memories." Amy glared at the rest of the table, as though daring them to gainsay her. "But I can dull them. Like they've just come off a twelve-hour bender. Blank the short-term memory, fuzz the more recent long-term. Just enough that nobody can pin anything on this place, or on anyone here. If I do that, can I stay?"
"Absolutely." From the relief with which Lisa uttered the word, she might well have been thinking the same as Taylor. For damn sure, nobody wanted to go up against Amy in a serious conflict.
"Good." Amy nodded. "Then after that, no more goddamn brains. Like, ever."
Taylor raised a finger, then leaned back as Amy swung the glare her way. "Uh … are you still okay to do different types of rats and birds and bugs for me?"
The expression that crossed Amy's face as she relaxed could almost have been mistaken for a smile. "Well, yeah. Those I can do, all day long."
"Cool." Aisha grinned at Vicky. "So, we still buds?"
Vicky leaned back in her seat and regarded the younger girl. "I remember you braiding my hair and playing patty-cake with me. You never lost patience with me, and you were always happy to see me." She smiled and held out her fist for a bump. "We'll always be buds. Though I'm never going to be calling you Most Esteemed Aisha again, just to be clear."
Aisha hunched her shoulder and ducked her head in what almost looked like embarrassment. "Seemed like a fun idea at the time, is all," she mumbled.
"I'm sure it did." Vicky snaked her arm around Aisha's neck and applied a light noogie. "And this is me saying thanks."
As Aisha flailed and protested—but not too strenuously—Mr Pelham shook his head slowly. "Well, I'll leave you to it. Sarah should be back soon, my bed is calling to me, and we've still got to get Carol home." Standing up, he stretched mightily. "It's been a very long day."
"You've still got the PRT to deal with as well, don't forget." Lisa raised an eyebrow. "What are you going to do there? Fake amnesia?"
Mr Pelham smiled tightly. "Gallant and I have already spoken about this, and gotten our story straight. Sarah will back us up along with Vicky and Amy, and Carol won't have the foggiest idea of what actually happened. Emily will fuss and snort, but we're not actually under PRT direction, so she can go whistle in the wind if she tries to press us for details."
"Oh, man." Aisha grinned. "Now I want pics of her face."
Amy stood up as well, and sighed. "Well, let's get this over with."
"Ames?" Vicky was standing, but she didn't move to join them. "For what it's worth?"
"Yeah?" Amy half-turned her head to glance back.
"Thanks. And I'm sorry it happened this way."
"Yeah," Amy said. "Me too."
Toybox Base
Cranial
Lil finished putting the last of her equipment away, then sagged into a chair and let out a heartfelt sigh. "Well, that was a clusterfuck of epic proportions."
"Oh, hey." Glace leaned around the door. "The rest of the money just came through. Oh, and Pyro's in the commons, telling everyone what the job was like. It wasn't that wild, was it? A real underground supervillain base, a party with pretend villains, with actual villains crawling out of the air ducts? I mean, really?"
Lil looked up at her. "Let me just put it this way. When a weird job comes up and I'm tempted to take it?"
"Yeah?"
"Remind me about this job."
"Oh."
"Yeah." Lil closed her eyes. "I hate the weird jobs."
Gallant
Dean stood in Deputy Director Renick's office with Armsmaster on one side of him and Triumph on the other. None of the three looked happy, either outwardly or via their emotional auras. Not that he could blame them.
"So, let me see if I've got this straight," Renick said, both his tone and his aura indicating his struggle to cope with what he was saying. "You were kidnapped eighteen hours ago by a red-headed girl, along with Lady Photon, and now you're saying it wasn't a villain attack at all?"
"That's correct, sir." Dean tried to keep his tone firm and forthright. "It was some kind of … I suppose you could call it a scavenger hunt. Capes I'd never heard of before. Once it was done, we just … left. The Pelhams, the Dallons, me … everyone. Nobody stopped us. No criminal intent, no theft, nobody got hurt." He shrugged. "I'd almost think someone like Uber and Leet were behind it, only I didn't see anyone like either of them there."
Renick sighed and took off his glasses to polish the lenses with a cloth. "Talking about the Dallons … is there any truth to the scurrilous rumours that are going around about Glory Girl and Panacea?"
Dean snorted. "What, that they're actually a couple? No, sir. And I should know. Glory Girl and I are still definitely going steady. In fact, I spoke to her tonight and she expressed interest in leaving New Wave and joining the Wards."
That took all three by surprise. "What, really?" asked Triumph. "Are you sure?"
Dean nodded. "Absolutely. She asked me to pass that on to you, and that she'd be in tomorrow to put in her formal application."
"Well, that's bad news for New Wave but good news for us, I suppose." Renick put his glasses back on. "So, that's all it really was? Some misguided cape version of a scavenger hunt? Do you think you could identify the cape responsible if you saw her again?"
Dean smiled, fully aware that Lisa would be a blonde again by the end of the night. "Absolutely, sir. I'd know that red hair anywhere."
PRT Building, the Next Day
Taylor
Danny sat with Taylor in a conference room, vending machine snacks in front of both of them. Taylor had tried eating her sandwich, but had only managed a few bites. "What's taking so long?" she asked in a low tone.
He'd already polished off his sandwich and half-emptied his can of soda; she envied his calm. "Well, for one thing, they're probably making sure the recording devices are up and running. Also, they seemed a little frazzled downstairs, so we're probably not their highest priority right now. And there's likely a little bit of a power play going on here. Seeing if we blurt out anything while we're alone that'll give them a lever to work on us."
At that moment, the door handle clicked, and a costumed hero strode in, carrying a Manila folder. "Sorry for keeping you waiting," he said, heading for the end of the table. From his mainly-red costume and visor, Taylor pegged him as Assault. "We've been running in circles this morning. New recruit needing to be interviewed, stuff like that. I'm sure you're no stranger to that, Mr Hebert."
Taylor was pretty sure she knew which recruit he was talking about, but didn't comment. Danny, on the other hand, nodded. "You've actually looked into who I am." He didn't sound surprised.
Assault quirked a corner of his mouth in a grin as he opened the folder. "We did that back when Taylor first triggered with powers. Kind of standard procedure when we've actually got information on a cape's identity. Not that we do anything with it, but it helps to know who we're going to be dealing with if the cape decides to join the PRT or Protectorate."
"So does that mean you try to find out who capes are if you haven't got a name for them straight away?" asked Taylor, raising her eyebrows.
"Not as a matter of course." Assault's tone was serious. "But you'd be astonished how many capes have public triggers. We keep their secrets for them if we can; we want as many heroes out there as possible, of course."
Danny snorted. "Are you quoting from a recruiting pamphlet? Because that's what it sounds like."
Reaching out to the folder, Assault deliberately moved a recruiting brochure under the folder. "Noo ..."
"Yeah, well, I wasn't really thinking of joining." Taylor shrugged. "Just to put that out there."
"Fair enough," Assault acknowledged. "Any particular reason why?"
She'd given her next statement some thought. "Prior commitments. I will be joining a team. Just not the Wards."
"New Wave?" he suggested.
Taylor shared a glance with her father; they'd both suspected this would come up, and had decided that feigning ignorance about the current situation with New Wave was the best policy. She turned back to Assault. "No. A new team in town. We're in the process of forming it."
"Well, far be it from me to hold you back." He turned a page in the folder, apparently thinking. "Just don't go taking on Lung or Kaiser on your first night out. The Empire and the ABB are the top dogs in the Brockton Bay underworld for a reason, and they don't fight fair."
"I'm totally down with that," she agreed. If she ran into Lung or Kaiser, the last thing she had in mind was a fair fight. "Was there anything else?"
"Yeah." He leaned forward with his elbows on the table, resting his chin on his interlaced fingers. "If you didn't mind, could you give me a run-down of your powers?"
This was where it could get tricky. "I control small creatures. Bugs, rats, birds, things like that. The bigger they get, the harder it is to control them, and the fewer I can control."
He sat up in his chair. "Really? So, how big a creature can you control?"
She chuckled. "If you're thinking 'human Master', not really. I need something smaller, with a much less complicated brain, before I can be sure of control." No sense in giving the PRT any ammunition.
"Ah." He sounded slightly relieved. "So … how many bugs at a time can you control?"
She shrugged lightly. "Everything in a one or two block radius, maybe? When it comes to birds and rats and things, I can't control as many as I can with bugs."
"And this is what happened to Ms Clements?"
Taylor grimaced and nodded. "I'd just got my powers, and I was feeling really, really threatened just about then. Are … are you going to be arresting me for that?"
He shook his head reassuringly. "We've already been over all the evidence, and I'm authorised to tell you that we're satisfied you were actually under threat. There may be a legal hearing, but that'll just be a matter of crossing the t's and dotting the i's. Between trigger trauma and the perceived need for self-defence, it shouldn't be a problem."
"Thanks." She hadn't even known about trigger events until Lisa had filled her in on them. "I don't want to say it's been keeping me up at night, but it kinda has."
"Yeah, I know how that goes. Now, is it just control, or does your power do other things?" He was watching her intently now.
"Oh, I can sense through their senses." She chuckled self-consciously. "Bugs have crap senses. Birds are better."
"I have no doubt." He grinned disarmingly. "Nothing else? Making them take off like rockets, or explode, or produce knockout venom?"
"Uh, no?" She blinked, miming incomprehension. "I can't make them do anything they can't naturally do. Though I have made a bunch of rats dance the Can-Can." Aisha had laughed herself sick, watching this.
That seemed to take him aback slightly. "I'm going to have to get footage of that. Another day. Moving on. This team of yours. Is there a redheaded girl on it? Or a Tinker, or a ranged Blaster, maybe? Any of the above?"
"No." Taylor shook her head firmly. "No Tinkers, no Blasters. Also, I only know one redhead, and she's one of the survivors of my trigger event. I'm pretty sure she's the one who called you guys on me, back when it happened."
"Ah, right. I think I remember her." Assault's lips thinned. "She lied her head off during the interview with Armsmaster, trying to make you look as bad as possible. So that was your trigger event right then in that bathroom, huh?"
"Well, I didn't have powers before, and I did after, so that's what I figure." She grimaced. "I'm pretty sure a container of sanitary products was involved. I was certain I was going to die."
"Ugh." Assault didn't seem to be faking his distaste, but this didn't stop him from dropping the next bombshell. "So, when you were facing Shadow Stalker, where did you get the knife from?"
"I honestly had no idea at the time," she said candidly. "I didn't have it and then I did. I'm still not certain, but I'm thinking that maybe Sophia put it in my hand so if she killed me she could claim self-defence. But I wasn't as far gone as she thought. I stabbed her and she backed off, so I dropped it and ran."
Assault nodded slowly, checking another page in the folder. "So, do you have any idea who killed her outside the bathrooms, and carved a swastika into her back?"
Taylor put her hands up. "All I know is, it wasn't me. I don't do swastikas and I don't run with the Empire."
Danny stirred and cleared his throat. "Just as a point of note here. If Taylor was an Empire sympathiser, do you honestly think she'd be forming a new team instead of just joining the current membership? More to the point, do you think I'd be so unworried about all this if my daughter was Empire? Two words: Hell and No."
"Okay, okay, I believe you. But I've just gotta ask the questions, so we can say we did. Don't shoot the messenger." Assault sighed. "So, one last question and we can put this to bed. Have you associated at all with Gallant or any of the New Wave capes in the last few days?"
Taylor blinked a couple of times, then shook her head. "Well, no. If I had, I would've gotten his autograph. Why, has something happened?" She hated lying, but she'd found that if she put that emotion into a bunch of bugs or rodents, they could act out the tells while she kept her face at 'politely attentive'.
"Nope, nothing of note." Assault closed the folder and stood up. "Thanks for coming in and speaking to us. I look forward to seeing where your cape career goes."
"Thanks." Taylor pushed her chair back and stood up as well. "Uh … before you go … could you …" Tentatively, she pulled out a notepad.
Assault actually laughed out loud. "Absolutely. Anything for a fan." Taking the pad, he scribbled a bold signature on the first blank page. "Nice meeting you, Taylor."
"It was very cool meeting you too." She shook his hand, then stepped aside so Danny could as well.
They exited the conference room and headed along to the elevator, then she and Danny rode down to the lobby. Barely anyone paid them any notice, which Taylor appreciated as they crossed the lobby and exited via the heavy sliding doors.
Outside, it was a brand-new day, and she intended to seize it. By the throat, if necessary.
Far overhead, the Simurgh turned her sightless eyes—and her course—to another part of the world. The story she'd nudged into being and watched with interest had played out to a conclusion both inevitable and amusing, but it was done with for the moment.
It was time to see what was going on elsewhere in Earth Bet.
End of One Bad Day
[A/N 1: Thank you for reading. This story was always going to be about solving the immediate problems of the main characters. It ends here, with Lisa, Taylor, Amy and Aisha forming a new team in Coil's old base, Circus in custody and a mentally rejuvenated Vicky joining the Wards.]
[A/N 2: And yes, this was indeed the Simurgh doing the equivalent of watching daytime TV.]
[A/N 3: I have no plans for a sequel at the moment. Sorry.]
Part Fifteen: Day's End
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Taylor
Just as Lisa sidled into the office, Taylor swore and ripped another sheet off the pad to lay alongside the others. This allowed her to extend the air duct onward with the assistance of a ruler. In the back of her mind, she kept pace with the skittering rodents and their accompanying bugs.
"How goes the search?" Lisa seemed pleased with herself.
"We were right." Taylor made another ruled line on the paper. "The official map isn't quite accurate. Oh, it looks good, if you don't pay too much attention to exact distances, but I'm pretty sure not all those angles are ninety degrees. And there are offshoots that could be missed if you're not paying attention."
"And you haven't located Circus yet." It wasn't a question on Lisa's part.
"Not yet," Taylor confirmed, "but I haven't found any more open air vents yet, and no more cameras have gone down. Better yet, even with the extra ductwork, I haven't had to leave any holes in the sweep, so she either has to kill the bugs and rats or get seen by them. Either way, I locate her."
"Excellent." Lisa slapped Taylor on the shoulder, but lightly. "When you do find her, let me know. I spoke to Amy, and she's on board with making more specialty critters to hunt her out. We were thinking of fireproof, knifeproof rats."
"Make sure they can't breed," Taylor cautioned. "If they leave my control radius, we do not want things like that getting out and causing trouble."
"More trouble than exploding pigeons?" retorted Lisa with a smirk. "Don't worry. I'll tell her."
With a final fingertip wave, she slipped out of the office again. Taylor growled another curse and filled in a little more of the air duct map.
"Where are you?" she muttered.
<><>
Circus
Coil had been lavish in supplying his little redoubt. The stored water was welcome after the breakout from the cell and the arduous crawl through the air ducting. Even more welcome were the protein bars; she'd spotted a crate of MREs, but decided she wasn't that hungry yet.
Gnawing on a protein bar and sipping from a square bottle of water, she sat cross-legged on the rubber matting and flicked through the selection of security feeds available to her on the small screen mounted on the low desk. There wasn't much to see in the area of the base she'd come from; not even the New Wave capes were back there right now. What's with that, anyway? What are they doing, chumming around with that skank Tattletale?
She shelved the question for another time, such as 'never'. The answers she wanted had more to do with how to get her hands on Tattletale, and how to extract her rightfully earned goddamn pay from that slippery little bitch. If Tattletale had access to Coil's money, and everything she'd ever heard about the supposedly psychic Thinker said that was a very strong fucking possibility, then the only obstacle standing in the way of getting her money was her unwillingness to threaten Tattletale's well-being.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as that, or she would've slithered out through the nearest air duct, put her hands around Tattletale's throat, and squeezed until she got what was owed to her. New Wave was on site, along with a couple of capes she'd never heard of before (at least, she assumed they were capes), and then there were the Toybox Tinkers down in the lower section, operating that weird chair. She knew enough to recognise Cranial and Pyrotechnical when she saw them, but she had no idea what they were doing here, or why Tattletale had seen fit to throw a fucking party in a goddamn supervillain base. Maybe the chair gave them some kind of Tinkertech high?
Did Tattletale blow my fucking money on a fucking party accessory?
She wasn't quite sure what the black girl with the purple streak in her hair was supposed to be able to do, but the tall skinny one with the black curly hair was definitely the Master who'd been setting swarms of bugs on her. She had a bone to pick with that one too; making spiders web her foot to the grating had not been cool. But Tattletale was her main target, and everything else was secondary.
The question is, do I wait for the party to finish and for everyone else to leave, or just come out now and kick Tattletale's ass until she ponies up the money I'm owed?
Nah, fuck that. If she leaves along with the normies, then I'm back to square one.
Let's fucking do this.
<><>
Cranial
With the engram completed, it still took two tries for Lil to anchor it to Glory Girl's tattered personality matrix. On the second attempt, she took extra care and double-checked all her readouts, then held her breath as she ran through the process, one step at a time. Finally, she was able to confirm that it was properly seated.
Next came the final stage in the process: running Glory Girl through a high-speed version of her life (that is, high-speed from the outside) to seal the engram into place, paper over any holes (because there would be holes) and generate an actual personality at the far end. While Lil had a certain amount of control over the process, she could only work with what she'd been given. Fortunately, Tattletale had managed to assemble a considerable amount of experiential data with which to assemble and adjust her very first entire-life engram, so she was confident she could pull it off.
Mostly.
This was the stage where if anything went wrong, it would have to be fixed or circumvented as they went. There was no question of stopping it and then restarting; the discontinuity that would inevitably occur would invalidate the entire process. And if she stopped it because something had gone sideways and tried to restart from scratch, the necessary removal of previously implanted memories would risk actual damage to Glory Girl's already-abused neural structure. Any kind of second attempt would be highly ill-advised.
Lil had never done something this ambitious before, but she'd gone over the specs for her equipment before agreeing to it. She could handle it. She would handle it. Glory Girl would be a hero again, and Toybox's rep would get another boost from people in the know.
Setting her teeth into her lower lip, she started the run-through. Glory Girl's eyes flickered back and forth as though she were asleep and dreaming, which was a good sign. Lil had generic memories queued for any holes that might crop up; with luck, they wouldn't even have to slow down as she slapped on the patch. Fortunately, she had plenty of images of Flashbang, both in costume and out. For anything else, she'd improvise on the fly.
As Victoria Dallon's early years whipped by, she narrowed her eyes and kept a careful watch for emerging problems. This wasn't just about the money anymore. Her pride was on the line.
<><>
Taylor
"Oh, what the fuck?" Taylor stared at her map of the air ducting as her rats milled around in the far corner from where they'd begun. They had traced every single air duct and even thrown their little bodies against each vent cover in turn to make sure said covers were securely screwed in place. They were all solid as a rock, except for the one that Circus had used to gain entry to the network. "How did she get past me?"
That Circus hadn't just turned around and left the same way she'd come in was patently obvious. People like Circus didn't just give up. Besides, that would've involved either squirming backwards with no way to see where she was going, or somehow turning around, something that Taylor felt would be nigh-impossible for anyone but a trained contortionist.
In any case, if Circus had done that, it would make her less of a problem. Taylor had to assume she was still dangerous, still on the board somehow. But what did she do? How did she pull that off? It's not like she can turn intangible like Sophia could, or invisible.
She paused. Waiiit a minute.
<><>
Tattletale
The party was going well, and so (Lisa hoped) was Cranial's work to restore Vicky to a recognisable semblance of her former self. She'd been leaning on her power a little too much, so she was reluctant to tap it now, but the Tinker appeared calm and unflustered as she worked on the screens attached to the chair. Even Vicky sat calmly under the oversized helmet, not even bothering to fidget.
Aisha had joined the party, her upbeat personality doing a great job at keeping the festivities going. In the meantime, Eric and Crystal had were also circulating while Manpower and Lady Photon were watching the unconscious Brandish. What they were going to do about Brandish, Lisa wasn't entirely sure yet. Excising this particular event from her memory would be prohibitively expensive, and Cranial probably didn't want her anywhere near the chair anyway.
Which brought her around to the last two players in the current little drama: Circus and Taylor. Circus being the problem, and Taylor being the potential solution.
Easing away from the rest of the group as Aisha did a manic (and somehow on-point) impression of Armsmaster trying to deal with hypothetical super-powered graffiti artists, Lisa snuck away into the office once more. It was her job to make sure everything was going well, she told herself. She wasn't micromanaging.
"How's it going?" she asked, once the door slid shut behind her.
"Problematic." Taylor didn't look up from the map she'd made. "I searched the air ducts that she could've gone through, from one end to the other. She's not there. Or she's figured out a way to hide."
Lisa blinked. "That's not good. That's not good at all. Please tell me you figured out a solution."
"Yeah." Taylor grinned. "Smell."
It took a second for Lisa to get it. "Oh. Rats can track by scent?"
"How do you think they can find where people hide their food?" asked Taylor rhetorically. "Damn right they can track by scent. They just don't normally track humans. But I sent them back to where she got into the air duct system, and they're on her trail right now. No matter what bullshit tactic she used to hide from them, they'll be able to find her."
"So, we've got her?" Lisa really, really wanted that to be true.
"Not yet." Taylor waggled her hand in the air. "But we're closing in on her, me and my beady-eyed minions."
Lisa shuddered, imagining trying to crawl through an air duct while a bunch of rats scuttled up behind her. It was only just preferable to being under Coil's thumb, and even that was kind of debatable. Still, it wasn't happening to her. Circus was another matter altogether. She wished the rats all the luck in finding the irritating cape.
If she'd just cut her losses from the beginning, we wouldn't be doing this.
<><>
Taylor
"Okay, this is weird." Taylor held up her hand just as Lisa was about to leave the office again.
"Weird good or weird bad?" Lisa did an about-face and stared at Taylor. "I can't handle many more unpleasant surprises today, just saying."
Taylor concentrated, trying to figure out what her rats had found. "There's some kind of … swinging panel in the wall of the air duct. I didn't see it before because I wasn't looking for it. But the rats smelled where she stopped and crawled into it."
"The fuck?" Lisa indicated the carefully drawn map of the air duct system. "You mean there's more to that shit?"
"Maybe." Taylor bit her lip. "The panel's pretty heavy. If I send a rat in there, it might be a one-way trip."
Lisa rolled her eyes. "So, send it in there. We need to know where she went to."
"Okay, then." Taylor had the rat push all the way through. It tried to hold onto the concrete and climb down, but the surface was too smooth, and it lost its grip. Fortunately, it only fell a short distance, as best Taylor could gauge, then landed on rubber matting. Being a rat, it bounced.
As it scuttled around, using its whiskers for guidance and sniffing everything it encountered, Taylor sketched out the layout of the space it had found itself in. She labelled each new section with her best guess at what it contained; protein bars, water bottles, a small desk with a computer screen … Fuck.
Lisa took one look at her face. "What? What is it?"
"Guns. She's got guns and ammo."
"Well, shit."
<><>
Circus
Okay, this is as good a place as any. She peered out through the grille at where the teen girls were enthusiastically partying under the tolerant gaze of (she presumed) their respective mothers. For some obscure reason, everyone was wearing a domino mask, even the publicly known heroes Laserdream and Shielder, who were also partying hearty.
The presence of the heroes served to damp down her immediate impulse to just jump in there and grab Tattletale. I'm going to have to be smart about this. There had to be a way to get her money and get away afterward, without being lasered to a crisp or beaten to a pulp.
Looking at the laughing crowd, gathered around the girl who was currently doing a standup routine of some kind, she grimaced. All those people could be problematic; once she revealed herself, they were likely to run around and cause more havoc, making it hard for her to keep an eye on where all the capes were. How to turn that from a problem into an asset …
A solution presented itself. Not one she usually went with; in fact, she preferred to stay as far away from bystanders as possible, but this situation just was not a normal one.
Fuck it, hostage it is.
<><>
Laserdream
As Aisha reached the climax of her improv Armsmaster skit, Crystal was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes. How such a petite girl managed to pull off the 'Robomaster' growl so expertly she had no idea, but it was perfect.
The first inkling she had of a problem was when Aisha cut off halfway through a line of dialogue and stared at—no, past—her, eyes widening. And then, from behind her, the girl she knew as Bethany screamed.
She turned fast, a laser already powering up in her right hand while her left generated a force shield. Off to the side, she registered Eric doing the same, as they'd practised. But the situation was already problematic; there stood Circus, holding Bethany around the neck with a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. The villain looked a little the worse for wear, and had a glint in her eye that suggested she was no longer quite sane anymore.
"Okay, everyone, calm the fuck down." Despite the phrasing, Circus didn't look or sound like she was taking her own advice. "Nobody freaks and does something stupid, nobody gets hurt." She gestured with the pistol. "Everyone who's not a cape, get over here, right now."
"Wh-what?" quavered a woman, probably Bethany's mother; Crystal didn't know for certain. "Why? Please don't hurt my daughter."
"Not gonna hurt her, unless she does something stupid, you do something stupid, or someone else does something stupid." Circus bit the words off tightly. "Now, I don't feel like getting my face lasered off, so get over here before I do something regrettable to your kid." She gestured again with the pistol, keeping the knife close to some very important blood vessels in Bethany's throat. "Same goes for everyone else here who's not a cape. Get over here. The more of you who are between me and the New Wave laser folk, the less chance someone dies through friendly fire. Got it?"
Bethany's mother was the first to do what she was told, moving over to stand next to her daughter. One by one, the others followed her lead, looking around as though silently asking whether this was part of the 'cape experience' they'd been promised, or whether things had just gone drastically wrong.
"Circus …" Crystal spoke carefully, trying to hit the right note so she didn't set off the unstable villain. "You might want to think this all the way through. There's many ways this doesn't end well, and if you start hurting civilians, it will go bad for you very quickly indeed."
"Well, lucky for the civilians I'm not here to hurt them, then." Circus' eyes flicked from one point to another, then down at where Cranial was working with her chair on the next level. "What's that all about, anyway? Actually, fuck it, I just don't care. Every member of New Wave who can throw a laser or put up a force field, I want you on the other side of that door." Her pistol barrel indicated one of the heavy sliding doors at the far end of the room.
"If you think we're going to leave you alone with the hostages—" began Eric hotly.
"—you're absolutely right," Crystal cut him off. "Come on. We'll go." Carefully, she didn't look at where Aisha had been … or had she? Even after having known the quirky girl for several days, it was still difficult to actually remember her existence on occasion.
Gallant was another matter altogether. Out of costume, he was just another teenage boy in a domino mask. His armour might have given him a fighting chance against Circus, but as it was, his emotion blasts might or might not send her over the edge. At the moment, he was part of the crowd around Circus, but Crystal knew he had to be assessing the chances of doing something when he got the chance.
"What about me?" Amy chose this moment to speak up. "You know me. Everyone knows me. Take me as a hostage instead of everyone else. Nobody's going to do anything when my life is on the line." She rolled her eyes. "If I get hurt, I might have to miss out on healing someone, and wouldn't that be a fucking shame."
"You know what?" Circus tilted her head. "Normally I might've taken you up on that, but right now I'm reading levels of 'fuck-this' from you that I don't really trust." As she spoke, the pistol vanished from her hand, to be replaced by a set of handcuffs. She tossed them overhand toward Amy, to land with a clatter at the healer's feet. "Cuff yourself to the handrail there, just to make sure you don't try pulling off some stupid kind of sacrifice play that doesn't accomplish anything except getting people killed."
Amy glared at her, but grudgingly bent over and took up the cuffs. "Why don't you just fuck off?" she demanded as she clicked the metal into place on the rail. "There's nothing for you here."
"And that's where you're wrong." Circus was hidden behind her human shield, but Crystal could hear the smugness in her voice. "I'm fucking owed. Coil had millions when he was ganked, and I want what he owed me. Give me that, and I'm gone."
"Okay, sure." Crystal didn't know how legitimate the claim was, but she'd sat in on hostage-negotiation seminars. Gotta keep her happy until we can take her down. "You'll get your money."
"Yeah, as if you've got any say in that." Circus's tone went straight back to 'cynical' faster than an Empire thug thinking up a new slur. "I told you New Wave assholes, through that door. Now, or Panacea gets some business. Got me?" The pistol waved in the air for a second. "And take Glory Girl with you too. Don't think I didn't recognise her in that stupid fucking chair."
"No." Cranial's voice cut across the murmurs of fear echoing in the chamber. "Glory Girl is not to be moved. This is a very delicate part of the procedure. She doesn't leave this chair until I say so."
"And if she says Glory Girl doesn't move, I say Glory Girl doesn't move." Pyrotechnical hadn't spoken in Crystal's hearing up until this point, but the chk-hmmmmmm from the heavy rifle-like weapon he carried backed up his words with a certain amount of weight.
Circus must have heard it too, because she didn't bother arguing. "Ooookay, then. Not sure what's going on down there, but so long as you keep yourselves to yourselves, I honestly do not give two-thirds of a flying fuck. Now, New Wavies, time to wavie goodbye, or I am going to stab someone. Three … two …one …"
"Okay, we're going, we're going." Hastily, Crystal grabbed Eric by the arm. "Come on, let's go, like the nice lady says." Lifting into the air, she flew toward the exit, dragging him along with her.
As they flew, his force field enclosed them, then a second one inside the first. This was a trick he'd learned early on; how to create a soundproof barrier. "You can't just leave them alone with her!" he protested.
"We can't stay," she countered. "Anyway, we're the visible capes. Aisha and Lisa and Taylor and Dean are right there, and Mom and Dad are downstairs with Aunt Carol, so if shit goes sideways they can come up and kick her ass. Once we're out of sight, she'll relax, maybe let down her guard or something."
"Jeez, I hope you're right about this." But he didn't resist her pull anymore. Together, they flew to the door; he dropped the shields and she slapped the button to open it. It rumbled open and they stepped through.
<><>
Aisha
Come on ... come on …
Being able to make people forget she was there was all well and good, but the unwilling bunch of human shields Circus had gathered around herself meant that Aisha couldn't get to her. She was totes willing to stabbify the party-crasher until the beeyatch fell over—nobody threatens my friends!—but as she'd learned previously, it helped a shit-ton if they didn't actually move around. Or have people standing around them who didn't know Aisha was there and trying to help.
Wrapping her hand around the swastika-topped knife she'd used to kill Shadow Stinker, Aisha left it in its sheath as she prowled around the outside of the crowd, looking for a way through. No sense in accidentally stabbing one of the hostages, after all. Some of them were actually pretty cool, once they got into the party spirit. Also, Lisa would probably yell at her.
"Okay, no need to hurt anyone." Lisa stuck her head out of the office. "Come on in, and we'll discuss your recompense."
"About fucking time. Everyone, head for that doorway. Don't go in. I'm pretty sure the room isn't big enough for us all." Circus waved her pistol forward, like a baton or something.
This was Aisha's chance. Darting around the perimeter of the crowd, she ducked in through the open doorway into the office. Taking up a position in a vacant corner, she poised herself, ready to pull her knife and stick it into anywhere on Circus she could reach.
Circus came in next, and hit the button to close and lock the door, watching Lisa and Taylor carefully. Then she looked around the room; for a moment, Aisha tensed, wondering if Circus could see her anyway, but the villain's eyes skated right over her. Finally, Circus pointed at the air vent, which had a filing cabinet pushed up against it. "Get that open."
Aisha could understand why she was doing it—if things went to shit, it was always good to have a bolt-hole—but the only place for the cabinet to go was the corner Aisha had chosen to lurk in. Grumbling to herself, she shifted locations while Lisa and Taylor applied their shoulders to the cabinet and scraped it aside. It was short work for Lisa to unscrew the grille and set it aside. "That better?"
"Much." Circus nodded in approval. "Now, as for my money …" She flipped a knife in the air and caught it again. Aisha pulled her own knife and started stalking her, but every time she thought she had a proper stab lined up, Circus would move. It was very irritating.
"Okay. The money." Lisa leaned over the keyboard and typed in a command, and the screen changed. "I'm going to lay it out for you. Total honesty up front. Okay?"
Circus glowered at her, not ceasing the restless pacing. "That doesn't sound like 'I've got your money right here'. In fact, it's starting to sound like an excuse. I'm not doing excuses right now."
"The immediate problem," Lisa began again, "is that once the PRT discovered that Coil was Calvert, they froze a lot of his assets. I managed to recover some—in fact, I recovered quite a bit—but nowhere near his total holdings. However, I can put what money I have into generating a lot more. Enough to pay you off. All you need is patience."
"No." Circus pointed at the figures on the screen. "That, right there, is enough to cover what I'm owed, plus ten percent asshole tax. I'll be taking that."
Lisa didn't look at the screen. "I'm afraid you're mistaken. That money right there? That's already spoken for. It's going to Toybox. I can get more—like I said, with time and effort, I can definitely generate enough to pay you off—but that's not mine to give you."
The pistol had vanished somewhere—Aisha really wanted to know how Circus pulled that shit—but the knife was still in her hand. Moving like a striking snake, Circus grabbed Taylor around the neck and held the knife up under her jaw, the very tip pricking her skin. Aisha froze, watching the tiniest droplet of blood well around the point of the blade. If I stabbed her now, she'd kill Taylor before I could stop her.
"I didn't say you're giving it to me." The villain's tone could've been used to jump-start a new ice age. "I said I was taking it. You can tell Toybox you're generating the money for them. That money right there is mine, and I'm taking it, or your skinny friend here develops a sudden and fatal case of laryngitis."
She is not hurting Taylor. No fucking way am I letting that happen. Aisha was fond of the tall gawky girl, especially since they'd worked together to put an end to Shadow Stalker. Taylor didn't have that many friends, and Aisha was pleased to be one of them.
"You kill me, you'll never get your money." Taylor's voice was muffled, mainly because she was only moving her lips, not the rest of her mouth.
"She's right." Lisa spoke firmly. "And besides, she's not the one you're pissed at. You've never even met her before. I'm the one you've got a bone to pick with."
Aisha realised exactly what Lisa had in mind, and started moving carefully, while sliding her knife back into its sheath. Lisa was trying to goad Circus into taking her hostage, and thus take the heat off Taylor. And at the same time, she was banking on Aisha being in the room and being able to take advantage of the knife being moved between the two of them.
"That's true." Circus shoved Taylor away and made a grab for Lisa. "She can—"
She'd moved before Aisha was properly ready, but this would be her best chance. Launching herself forward, she tackled Circus away from both Lisa and Taylor, grabbing for the villain's knife hand. Taken off balance, Circus let out a loud whoof as they hit the wall, but she was still lucid enough to roll to the side and throw Aisha off.
"Okay, what the fuck was—" As Circus went to scramble to her feet, Lisa and Taylor tackled her, both wrestling for the knife. Circus produced the pistol in her other hand, and Aisha darted in to grab it, preventing Circus from pointing it at anyone. Screaming incoherently, Circus pulled the trigger anyway, deafening her; the bullet shattered the light, leaving the computer screen to illuminate the room.
Aisha wanted to pull her blade and stab the bitch, but both her hands were taken up with keeping the pistol pointed away from everyone (including her) because Circus was fucking strong. So, she did the next best thing, and bit Circus on the thumb as hard as she could. Circus flailed, and the pistol went flying across the room.
They wrestled across the floor, Aisha concentrating on making sure Circus couldn't grab anything out of her bullshit pocket dimension with that hand, while Taylor and Lisa kept her from stabbing them with the other hand. If anyone had told her before this point that it would be almost impossible for three teenage girls to keep one adult woman in check, she would've scoffed mightily. Three on one? There was no way anyone could beat that.
Circus, it turned out, could beat that. She was almost inhumanly agile, stronger than any two of them put together, and she was really good at fighting. She twisted, kicked, thrashed and applied moves Aisha never would've thought of—and she fought dirty. Although she should've still been imperceptible, Aisha found herself flung off the dogpile and skidding across the floor.
Before she could throw herself back into the fray, Circus used the now-free hand to apply some leverage. First Lisa and then Taylor ended up piling against the far wall, then Circus pulled some judo bullshit flip that got her to her feet. She'd lost the knife during the melee, but that didn't seem to bother her, as she pulled out a fucking machine-pistol from thin air.
"Okay, then," she snarled, the words barely audible to Aisha through the ringing in her ears. "That's it. I'm done with you assholes." She pulled back something on the gun, making an ominous clack-clack noise. "Sayonara, motherfuckers."
She raised the weapon, sighting down the barrel toward Lisa. Her intent was obvious: kill her main target first, then spray the rest of the room. Just because she couldn't perceive Aisha didn't mean the bullets wouldn't kill her just the same.
"W-wait," Taylor croaked. "Something you've … you've forgotten."
"The fuck you talking about?" demanded Circus.
Aisha saw Taylor grin. "I don't just control bugs."
And that was when the seven rats erupted from the open air duct, directly behind Circus. The first she knew of them was when they clawed all over her head, going for her eyes. It would've taken a will of steel to keep the machine pistol aimed while this happened, something Circus apparently lacked.
Letting out a shriek that threatened to deafen Aisha all over again, she let go the machine-pistol, allowing it to clatter to the ground, while she grabbed for the rats assaulting her. Aisha took the opportunity to go for the previously discarded pistol, while Lisa dived for the gun Circus had just dropped. Circus wasn't entirely unaware of what was going on around her, though, as evidenced by the neat snap-kick that sent Lisa tumbling backward again.
And then, just as Circus threw the last rat away from her, and Aisha was figuring out which way around the pistol was supposed to point, the sliding door into the office opened with a grinding screech. A slender figure was silhouetted in the doorway. "Hi. Miss me?"
Pulling yet another fucking gun out of nowhere, Circus swung it straight-armed toward the newcomer. Glory Girl caught it in her hand and crushed it with a simple metallic crunch. Then she stepped forward and back-handed the villain into the wall; Circus hit hard, bounced off, then collapsed bonelessly to the floor.
Dusting her hands off, Vicky looked around with satisfaction. "Okay, so I know most of what's going on around here, but I'm not totally sure why Amy's handcuffed to the rail out there and Circus is in here fighting you two … oh, you three. Hi, Aisha. Would someone care to fill me in?"
<><>
Two Hours Later
Taylor
After a quick explanation, Vicky had gone out and joined the party. Taylor, cloaking herself in a hastily gathered swarm, went out also as Swarmina, and was duly 'defeated' to cheers from the guests and their mothers. Once Aisha came out as well and passed off the Circus incident as a last-ditch effort by the fictitious Mind-Melter to foil the intended rescue attempt, Bethany and her mother looked somewhat mollified.
It was funny, Taylor mused, how rapidly they'd modified their own memories, given the new 'information', to the point that they thought they'd been in no danger at all. Bethany was actually proud she'd been picked as the hostage, and her friends were quick to boast about how they'd seen through it the whole time.
The party had wound down a little while after that, and the Pelham fliers volunteered to return their guests to their homes; the girls had left chatting excitedly how cool the whole experience had been. Vicky had suggested that she could ferry Dean home, but Lisa had nixed that idea. It was best, she decided, that he be dropped at the PRT building (after everyone else) so that he could declare himself officially unkidnapped.
Which left Taylor, Amy, Aisha, Vicky, Lisa and Mr Pelham sitting around a table in the base commissary. The story had been told in its entirety, with Aisha interjecting now and again, as was her habit. Amy sat at the opposite end of the table to Vicky—by choice, not by chance—with her head down and shoulders hunched, as though expecting to be physically attacked at any moment.
"So, I gotta ask," Aisha said, irrepressible as ever. "What's it feel like? Do you feel like you in there?"
Vicky tilted her head as she considered the question. "Well, yes. Who else would I feel like?" She grinned at Aisha. "Cranial did a really good job. Everything she implanted feels genuine, and even though I know intellectually that most of them aren't memories I personally experienced, I honestly can't tell between the ones from elsewhere and the few that I'm pretty sure are original issue."
Amy lifted her head. "Why?" she asked, so quietly she almost went unheard.
It took Vicky a moment or so to look around. "Why what? Why haven't I done what you so clearly want me to do, and killed you for what you did to me?"
Mr Pelham started half out of his seat at that. "Amy! Vicky! What—"
Vicky waved him down. "It's all good. Yeah, Ames really did a number on me, and I've got every right to be pissed at her. And yeah, I am. But I'm more angry at myself for not seeing what was right in front of me, what was going through her mind. What happened that day was more than a little my fault, and I need to take responsibility for my own actions. And my failures to act."
Amy jumped up. "You can't just forgive me for what—"
"Forgive? No." Vicky shook her head. "Not exactly, anyway. If I'm to understand what Lisa says, it was at least partially your power's fault, playing on your attraction to me. And also my power, making you fall in love with me, when it didn't do that to anyone else. So yes, there's plenty of blame to be had, and it can be spread far and wide."
"No!" The anguish in Amy's voice rang from the concrete ceiling. "I did this! I did it! Me! I fucked your brain up! Why aren't you punishing me?"
Vicky looked at her with sorrow and empathy. "Because there's nothing I can do that will hurt you one-tenth as much as the pain you've been putting yourself through. And because you willingly put yourself through that hell just to make sure that I'd be okay, in the end." She took a deep breath. "But if we can't guarantee it will never happen again—and we can't—then it's best we not be on the same team anymore."
"What, you're leaving New Wave?" Mr Pelham looked shocked.
"No, you can't, not on my account!" Amy shook her head violently. "I—I was going to leave anyway. I don't—I can't be on the same team as Carol, either. Not anymore. Not after today."
"Me, too." Vicky looked at her uncle apologetically. "Same person, different reasons. I'm thinking I might join the Wards." She paused. "Uh—unless you were already going there, Amy?"
"No." Amy glanced at Lisa. "I got another offer. Lisa, Taylor and Aisha were going to be forming a team right here, and they said I could stay if I wanted."
"I'll be needing to go into the PRT building too," Taylor noted. "Probably the first thing tomorrow, so they can tell me I'm not in trouble. Lisa?"
Lisa nodded. "You should still have time by then. Just don't tell them anything about … well, anything."
Taylor snorted. "Yeah, I think I got that one already."
Amy roused herself again. "What about Circus and Carol?"
Mr Pelham looked at her curiously. "Circus goes to the PRT, and Carol goes back to her house. Why?"
"I think she's saying, they're likely to start shouting about what happened tonight," Aisha chimed in helpfully. "Brandish is gonna have all sorts of fun stories to tell about being held against her will, an' drugged by bugs an' stuff. And I can tell Circus will draw 'em a map to this place, on the off-chance it'll fuck Lisa over once an' for all."
"Ah," said Vicky, realisation settling in on her features. "Yeah. Mom would totally do that. And I can believe that of Circus, too." She looked at Amy. "You're saying we should do something about that? Maybe call Cranial back?"
"Hahaha, nope." Lisa shook her head definitively. "We absolutely can't afford her rates, right now. And she charges through the nose when it comes to having unwilling capes in her chair."
Amy's features were creased in something approaching pain. "This sort of shit is what started this whole mess. If—if I do something about this … have I still got a place here?"
Taylor tilted her head curiously. "When you say 'do something about this' … what did you have in mind?" Please don't say kill them … please don't say kill them …
"I won't remove any memories." Amy glared at the rest of the table, as though daring them to gainsay her. "But I can dull them. Like they've just come off a twelve-hour bender. Blank the short-term memory, fuzz the more recent long-term. Just enough that nobody can pin anything on this place, or on anyone here. If I do that, can I stay?"
"Absolutely." From the relief with which Lisa uttered the word, she might well have been thinking the same as Taylor. For damn sure, nobody wanted to go up against Amy in a serious conflict.
"Good." Amy nodded. "Then after that, no more goddamn brains. Like, ever."
Taylor raised a finger, then leaned back as Amy swung the glare her way. "Uh … are you still okay to do different types of rats and birds and bugs for me?"
The expression that crossed Amy's face as she relaxed could almost have been mistaken for a smile. "Well, yeah. Those I can do, all day long."
"Cool." Aisha grinned at Vicky. "So, we still buds?"
Vicky leaned back in her seat and regarded the younger girl. "I remember you braiding my hair and playing patty-cake with me. You never lost patience with me, and you were always happy to see me." She smiled and held out her fist for a bump. "We'll always be buds. Though I'm never going to be calling you Most Esteemed Aisha again, just to be clear."
Aisha hunched her shoulder and ducked her head in what almost looked like embarrassment. "Seemed like a fun idea at the time, is all," she mumbled.
"I'm sure it did." Vicky snaked her arm around Aisha's neck and applied a light noogie. "And this is me saying thanks."
As Aisha flailed and protested—but not too strenuously—Mr Pelham shook his head slowly. "Well, I'll leave you to it. Sarah should be back soon, my bed is calling to me, and we've still got to get Carol home." Standing up, he stretched mightily. "It's been a very long day."
"You've still got the PRT to deal with as well, don't forget." Lisa raised an eyebrow. "What are you going to do there? Fake amnesia?"
Mr Pelham smiled tightly. "Gallant and I have already spoken about this, and gotten our story straight. Sarah will back us up along with Vicky and Amy, and Carol won't have the foggiest idea of what actually happened. Emily will fuss and snort, but we're not actually under PRT direction, so she can go whistle in the wind if she tries to press us for details."
"Oh, man." Aisha grinned. "Now I want pics of her face."
Amy stood up as well, and sighed. "Well, let's get this over with."
"Ames?" Vicky was standing, but she didn't move to join them. "For what it's worth?"
"Yeah?" Amy half-turned her head to glance back.
"Thanks. And I'm sorry it happened this way."
"Yeah," Amy said. "Me too."
<><>
Toybox Base
Cranial
Lil finished putting the last of her equipment away, then sagged into a chair and let out a heartfelt sigh. "Well, that was a clusterfuck of epic proportions."
"Oh, hey." Glace leaned around the door. "The rest of the money just came through. Oh, and Pyro's in the commons, telling everyone what the job was like. It wasn't that wild, was it? A real underground supervillain base, a party with pretend villains, with actual villains crawling out of the air ducts? I mean, really?"
Lil looked up at her. "Let me just put it this way. When a weird job comes up and I'm tempted to take it?"
"Yeah?"
"Remind me about this job."
"Oh."
"Yeah." Lil closed her eyes. "I hate the weird jobs."
<><>
Gallant
Dean stood in Deputy Director Renick's office with Armsmaster on one side of him and Triumph on the other. None of the three looked happy, either outwardly or via their emotional auras. Not that he could blame them.
"So, let me see if I've got this straight," Renick said, both his tone and his aura indicating his struggle to cope with what he was saying. "You were kidnapped eighteen hours ago by a red-headed girl, along with Lady Photon, and now you're saying it wasn't a villain attack at all?"
"That's correct, sir." Dean tried to keep his tone firm and forthright. "It was some kind of … I suppose you could call it a scavenger hunt. Capes I'd never heard of before. Once it was done, we just … left. The Pelhams, the Dallons, me … everyone. Nobody stopped us. No criminal intent, no theft, nobody got hurt." He shrugged. "I'd almost think someone like Uber and Leet were behind it, only I didn't see anyone like either of them there."
Renick sighed and took off his glasses to polish the lenses with a cloth. "Talking about the Dallons … is there any truth to the scurrilous rumours that are going around about Glory Girl and Panacea?"
Dean snorted. "What, that they're actually a couple? No, sir. And I should know. Glory Girl and I are still definitely going steady. In fact, I spoke to her tonight and she expressed interest in leaving New Wave and joining the Wards."
That took all three by surprise. "What, really?" asked Triumph. "Are you sure?"
Dean nodded. "Absolutely. She asked me to pass that on to you, and that she'd be in tomorrow to put in her formal application."
"Well, that's bad news for New Wave but good news for us, I suppose." Renick put his glasses back on. "So, that's all it really was? Some misguided cape version of a scavenger hunt? Do you think you could identify the cape responsible if you saw her again?"
Dean smiled, fully aware that Lisa would be a blonde again by the end of the night. "Absolutely, sir. I'd know that red hair anywhere."
<><>
PRT Building, the Next Day
Taylor
Danny sat with Taylor in a conference room, vending machine snacks in front of both of them. Taylor had tried eating her sandwich, but had only managed a few bites. "What's taking so long?" she asked in a low tone.
He'd already polished off his sandwich and half-emptied his can of soda; she envied his calm. "Well, for one thing, they're probably making sure the recording devices are up and running. Also, they seemed a little frazzled downstairs, so we're probably not their highest priority right now. And there's likely a little bit of a power play going on here. Seeing if we blurt out anything while we're alone that'll give them a lever to work on us."
At that moment, the door handle clicked, and a costumed hero strode in, carrying a Manila folder. "Sorry for keeping you waiting," he said, heading for the end of the table. From his mainly-red costume and visor, Taylor pegged him as Assault. "We've been running in circles this morning. New recruit needing to be interviewed, stuff like that. I'm sure you're no stranger to that, Mr Hebert."
Taylor was pretty sure she knew which recruit he was talking about, but didn't comment. Danny, on the other hand, nodded. "You've actually looked into who I am." He didn't sound surprised.
Assault quirked a corner of his mouth in a grin as he opened the folder. "We did that back when Taylor first triggered with powers. Kind of standard procedure when we've actually got information on a cape's identity. Not that we do anything with it, but it helps to know who we're going to be dealing with if the cape decides to join the PRT or Protectorate."
"So does that mean you try to find out who capes are if you haven't got a name for them straight away?" asked Taylor, raising her eyebrows.
"Not as a matter of course." Assault's tone was serious. "But you'd be astonished how many capes have public triggers. We keep their secrets for them if we can; we want as many heroes out there as possible, of course."
Danny snorted. "Are you quoting from a recruiting pamphlet? Because that's what it sounds like."
Reaching out to the folder, Assault deliberately moved a recruiting brochure under the folder. "Noo ..."
"Yeah, well, I wasn't really thinking of joining." Taylor shrugged. "Just to put that out there."
"Fair enough," Assault acknowledged. "Any particular reason why?"
She'd given her next statement some thought. "Prior commitments. I will be joining a team. Just not the Wards."
"New Wave?" he suggested.
Taylor shared a glance with her father; they'd both suspected this would come up, and had decided that feigning ignorance about the current situation with New Wave was the best policy. She turned back to Assault. "No. A new team in town. We're in the process of forming it."
"Well, far be it from me to hold you back." He turned a page in the folder, apparently thinking. "Just don't go taking on Lung or Kaiser on your first night out. The Empire and the ABB are the top dogs in the Brockton Bay underworld for a reason, and they don't fight fair."
"I'm totally down with that," she agreed. If she ran into Lung or Kaiser, the last thing she had in mind was a fair fight. "Was there anything else?"
"Yeah." He leaned forward with his elbows on the table, resting his chin on his interlaced fingers. "If you didn't mind, could you give me a run-down of your powers?"
This was where it could get tricky. "I control small creatures. Bugs, rats, birds, things like that. The bigger they get, the harder it is to control them, and the fewer I can control."
He sat up in his chair. "Really? So, how big a creature can you control?"
She chuckled. "If you're thinking 'human Master', not really. I need something smaller, with a much less complicated brain, before I can be sure of control." No sense in giving the PRT any ammunition.
"Ah." He sounded slightly relieved. "So … how many bugs at a time can you control?"
She shrugged lightly. "Everything in a one or two block radius, maybe? When it comes to birds and rats and things, I can't control as many as I can with bugs."
"And this is what happened to Ms Clements?"
Taylor grimaced and nodded. "I'd just got my powers, and I was feeling really, really threatened just about then. Are … are you going to be arresting me for that?"
He shook his head reassuringly. "We've already been over all the evidence, and I'm authorised to tell you that we're satisfied you were actually under threat. There may be a legal hearing, but that'll just be a matter of crossing the t's and dotting the i's. Between trigger trauma and the perceived need for self-defence, it shouldn't be a problem."
"Thanks." She hadn't even known about trigger events until Lisa had filled her in on them. "I don't want to say it's been keeping me up at night, but it kinda has."
"Yeah, I know how that goes. Now, is it just control, or does your power do other things?" He was watching her intently now.
"Oh, I can sense through their senses." She chuckled self-consciously. "Bugs have crap senses. Birds are better."
"I have no doubt." He grinned disarmingly. "Nothing else? Making them take off like rockets, or explode, or produce knockout venom?"
"Uh, no?" She blinked, miming incomprehension. "I can't make them do anything they can't naturally do. Though I have made a bunch of rats dance the Can-Can." Aisha had laughed herself sick, watching this.
That seemed to take him aback slightly. "I'm going to have to get footage of that. Another day. Moving on. This team of yours. Is there a redheaded girl on it? Or a Tinker, or a ranged Blaster, maybe? Any of the above?"
"No." Taylor shook her head firmly. "No Tinkers, no Blasters. Also, I only know one redhead, and she's one of the survivors of my trigger event. I'm pretty sure she's the one who called you guys on me, back when it happened."
"Ah, right. I think I remember her." Assault's lips thinned. "She lied her head off during the interview with Armsmaster, trying to make you look as bad as possible. So that was your trigger event right then in that bathroom, huh?"
"Well, I didn't have powers before, and I did after, so that's what I figure." She grimaced. "I'm pretty sure a container of sanitary products was involved. I was certain I was going to die."
"Ugh." Assault didn't seem to be faking his distaste, but this didn't stop him from dropping the next bombshell. "So, when you were facing Shadow Stalker, where did you get the knife from?"
"I honestly had no idea at the time," she said candidly. "I didn't have it and then I did. I'm still not certain, but I'm thinking that maybe Sophia put it in my hand so if she killed me she could claim self-defence. But I wasn't as far gone as she thought. I stabbed her and she backed off, so I dropped it and ran."
Assault nodded slowly, checking another page in the folder. "So, do you have any idea who killed her outside the bathrooms, and carved a swastika into her back?"
Taylor put her hands up. "All I know is, it wasn't me. I don't do swastikas and I don't run with the Empire."
Danny stirred and cleared his throat. "Just as a point of note here. If Taylor was an Empire sympathiser, do you honestly think she'd be forming a new team instead of just joining the current membership? More to the point, do you think I'd be so unworried about all this if my daughter was Empire? Two words: Hell and No."
"Okay, okay, I believe you. But I've just gotta ask the questions, so we can say we did. Don't shoot the messenger." Assault sighed. "So, one last question and we can put this to bed. Have you associated at all with Gallant or any of the New Wave capes in the last few days?"
Taylor blinked a couple of times, then shook her head. "Well, no. If I had, I would've gotten his autograph. Why, has something happened?" She hated lying, but she'd found that if she put that emotion into a bunch of bugs or rodents, they could act out the tells while she kept her face at 'politely attentive'.
"Nope, nothing of note." Assault closed the folder and stood up. "Thanks for coming in and speaking to us. I look forward to seeing where your cape career goes."
"Thanks." Taylor pushed her chair back and stood up as well. "Uh … before you go … could you …" Tentatively, she pulled out a notepad.
Assault actually laughed out loud. "Absolutely. Anything for a fan." Taking the pad, he scribbled a bold signature on the first blank page. "Nice meeting you, Taylor."
"It was very cool meeting you too." She shook his hand, then stepped aside so Danny could as well.
They exited the conference room and headed along to the elevator, then she and Danny rode down to the lobby. Barely anyone paid them any notice, which Taylor appreciated as they crossed the lobby and exited via the heavy sliding doors.
Outside, it was a brand-new day, and she intended to seize it. By the throat, if necessary.
<><>
Far overhead, the Simurgh turned her sightless eyes—and her course—to another part of the world. The story she'd nudged into being and watched with interest had played out to a conclusion both inevitable and amusing, but it was done with for the moment.
It was time to see what was going on elsewhere in Earth Bet.
End of One Bad Day
[A/N 1: Thank you for reading. This story was always going to be about solving the immediate problems of the main characters. It ends here, with Lisa, Taylor, Amy and Aisha forming a new team in Coil's old base, Circus in custody and a mentally rejuvenated Vicky joining the Wards.]
[A/N 2: And yes, this was indeed the Simurgh doing the equivalent of watching daytime TV.]
[A/N 3: I have no plans for a sequel at the moment. Sorry.]
Ack
(Verified Ratbag) (Unverified Great Old One)
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You did read the beginning of Part 1, right?
Anor
Know what you're doing yet?
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Lisa, Taylor, Aisha and Amy...God, that sounds like a team you wouldn't want to piss off. It's a shame you're not planning a sequel. I wish I could read about their adventures.
Anyway, thank you for sharing this wonderful story with us!
Anyway, thank you for sharing this wonderful story with us!
Vanrus
vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas
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TBF part 1 was seven years ago, lol. That being said I did reread part 1 to remind myself how this whole debacle got started in the first place
Enigmatic
I will become the ultimate little sister!
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7 years?! Holy shit!! I showed up at the perfect time then. Always fun to read one of Ack's things. Especially one where Coil gets royally fucked.